SXSW ‘10: Putty Hill, Mars, Cold Weather

Putty Hill begins with brisk, no-nonsense establishing shots from the rural parts of Baltimore—a house, a hill—and then the opening credits pause everything before it's started. We're looking at a wall: the light's mid-day but diffuse, red is coming from somewhere, and you can hear a cello warming up its scales and arpeggios. It's a startlingly atmospheric, non-naturalistic opening for what should be quotidian social realism, and indicative of where Putty Hill is heading: wild, weird places. Matthew Porterfield's response to Baltimore—our collective national shithole of choice since The Wire—is to treat the city as an imaginative destination, where anyone can take off mentally.

The plot, as in Porterfield's Hamilton, is meant to be disregarded. A junkie's overdosed, and these are the days leading up to his funeral—days of a weird, Linklater-esque quality, where time melts and days dissolve. You could see it as hopelessness (and there's a lot to support that), but there's a lightness of touch here like nothing I've seen in recent American regional filmmaking. I love All The Real Girls as much as the next guy, but it's hard to support that kind of rapture all the time. Putty Hill, by contrast, steers away from swooning, treading lightly where others don't dare to enter without the grimmest of faces or the lushest of fiilm stock. Porterfield has cited Pedro Costa as a reference point, but there's a world of distance from here to Colossal Youth's misery.

In Hamilton, most conversations unfolded as a series of people offering neutral, ELIZA-esque questions to one another, to draw each other out. Porterfield is bolder here: the diegetic narrative, such as it is, stops cold so that Porterfield can ask the questions himself off-camera. His voice is thin and reedy, the questions the most basic who-what-where: the narrative's in the texture, not the answers. Regard, seriously, the grim parking lot shitstorm that is the Baltimore Travel Center. Porterfield's looking at the awful walls and thin coats of paint seriously and asking us to pay attention.

Because the interviews break up scenes that are almost always impressionistic rather than narrative, Putty Hill is simultaneously head-on (literally) and oblique. Everyone is unfailingly open to talking about themselves honestly; one bad dude shrugs off the disclosure that he was in prison for second-degree murder for a long time. There's a diversity of age and viewpoint here that's surprising (though there's a racial gap; this is very much a film about a mostly white community), and it's really fun to watch. It's consistently gorgeous, occasionally lyrical (teenagers hanging out by the river, innocently indulging illicit drinking and drugs) and surprisingly funny.

Towards the end, Hamilton guns for the dramatic twice in ways that are surprising and gutsy, if not entirely successful. There's a teenage girl's long freak-out at her delinquent dad, a torrent of tears and screaming interrupted by a three-minute patch of nothing while she's alone; it's brave and convincing, if not really necessary. The bar memorial-service (complete with heartfelt karaoke) is a great moment of release and grace (it's also the first time we see the dead boy's face). Unfortunately, it's followed by a long coda where two girls visit the dead man's pad, then leave as the highway lights blur into dazzling pixels. It's over-explicit and straining in a way the rest of the film isn't. This is one graceful movie.

Mars is the movie SXSW's been waiting for all these years, something so emblematic and representative of everything you could associate with the festival (Mark Duplass, references to enchiladas and beer, Texas iconoclast Kinky Friedman) that part of me wishes it would never show anywhere else and just pop up annually at the festival as a sort of trademark. But that would be doing the movie a disservice: it's broader than that. Rough around the edges, with some not-quite-endearingly-amateurish performances in parts and lackadaisacal plotting, it's ambles along all slacker-like—and yes, the unusual rotoscoping feature does invoke Waking Life.

Mars has Duplass do his Duplass thing (he's the new Owen Wilson) as the indelibly named Charlie Brownsville: he's likable and self-deflatingly arrogant, a mean who uses self-righteous unassertiveness as a power tool. Once a famous astronaut, Charlie's spacewalking skills make him an unusable anachronism in 2014. In this vaguely sketched out future, the European Union, the Russians and Americans are once again still fighting it out in a new space race; that the movie never explains why is pleasing. So there's a mission to mars, signs of life, a heroic space-walk (is this an unofficial homage to Brian De Palma's oddly, cultishly adored Mission To Mars? That would be awesome), etc. But mostly it's all par for the slacker course, which is also awesome: animation removes the urgent need to use expensive F/X, which means you can now shoot someone into space just so they can crack wise about how they miss beer.

There's a romance too, which proceeds unexpectedly but ends happily. Indeed, nothing in Mars is surprising, but it's all about the detours and tangents anyway. (It's not, despite appearances, an "Adult Swim" assault of randomness.) The animation is very cool indeed: the way space seems deep and the stars looming is a triumph, inducing some real vertigo. But that epic nature is casual too, just like this movie. It's good fun.

One of the many surprising things about Cold Weather is that you could show it in a movie theater and normal filmgoers would love it. You could expect a lot of different things from Aaron Katz, but crowd-pleasing proficiency isn't one of them: I spent a lot of time thinking "They should've let that guy direct Cop Out." This isn't a slam at all: smooth, humane, well-crafted entertainment is harder than it looks. And there's more going on.

For the first half-hour, things go more or less as you'd expect: there's the floundering Doug (Cris Lankenau), who has chosen to ditch his pursuit of a forensics science degree in favor of fucking around and living with his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn). Keegan DeWitt's bravura funhouse, Rube-Goldberg-in-musical-form score is jovial and upbeat but unsettling: it's hard to tell if it's sarcastic, promising fun, spastically energetic or just setting us up for a sucker punch. (It works the same way as the opening music of Hong Sang-soo's films.) Doug does his work, drops some science on a co-worker (Raúl Castillo) about the awesomeness of Sherlock Holmes, co-worker dates his ex, you can see the seeds of romantic rivalry... and then everything goes to hell.

Appropriately, I went in rasa about Cold Weather, so I'm in the unhelpful position of trying not to spoil it and talk about it at the same time; suffice it to say the Holmes allusions aren't a red herring, and the movie quasi-spirals into genre territory accordingly. (Though a bigger and more meaningful allusion comes from Doug's reading of Raffles, the British chestnut about the gentlemen burglar whose public-school education merely gets him access to the houses of the wealthy, the better to rob them; like Raffles, Doug is slumming for a purpose—to get through the twentysomething malaise—and he knows it.)

If Cold Weather is surprisingly well-plotted on the genre tip, it's also a genuinely original comedy, with big laughs in completely unexpected places. As usual for Katz, it looks great, but the cutting's faster and the mood lighter; Dance Party USA and Quiet City are mood pieces, but this isn't. It works in every sense, buzzing along industriously. It's a little unbalanced about keeping all of its equally intriguing characters in the mix (I would've loved to see more of Castillo's Carlos, the ice factory co-worker/Star Trek fanboy/DJ), but there are worse problems to have.

At the heart of the thing is a brother-sister relationship that's teasing and enigmatic; the heart of the matter lies in Gail's off-handed confession that she dated a guy she liked for six months without ever telling her brother. This is in response to an impossible-to-parse question ("I don't mean this offensively, but do you have any friends?") It's a big moment, and it tells us a lot about this mutually dependent sibling pair, who never can tell if they're sustaining each other or just being mutual millstones. The mystery enlivens and gives purpose to their still-figuring-it-all-out stumbling, but it's so jokey and improbable that they know it, too. (No one dies, natch.) It's the solution to "How do I get out of this mess?," and it's a fun game to play, a gift from Katz. But the melancholy's real too, even if it's understated; that monologue cuts to the bone. The pair are, finally, as ambivalent, fluid and unsettled as any of Katz's increasingly impressive ensemble group, and their emotional heft gives the game-playing ballast. This is a huge treat, and I hope it makes a ton of money. In a perfect world, it totally should.

Posted by ahillis at March 14, 2010 3:07 PM