Ballast

Lance Hammer
2008

This much ballyhooed debut feature won the director's prize at this year's Sundance festival, and considering the festival's long suffering decline in quality standards, it's nice to see a worthy picture take a big prize. The film would mainly be a three person chamber drama were Hammer not so taken with the bleak and muddy expanse of winter in the Mississippi Delta. Some dangerous social cliches are skirted here, with an adolescent boy in deep to local drug dealers, a mother with an addict past, and a predictably broken family. However, Hammer succeeds in letting these dramatic moments breathe to at least a quasi-reslolution. The youth is able (if momentarily) to escape drugs, and mother and brother-in-law are able to manage a believably uneasy truce. Michael J. Smith Sr.'s performance is the cornerstone of the film with his unflappable gentleness and soulful sorrow belying a massively imposing frame. The intensity of attempted suicide and drug abuse in the first act gives way to a rockily recuperative second and third - an unorthodox move that provides a vague blueprint for the complex tone and rich atmosphere of the picture's world. Unfortunately, the cinematography's leaves a little to be desired with it's overly blue coloring and murky, low-contrast palette. Still, this is one of 2008's better films.