By Lindsay Zoladz
People who don’t like David Gordon Green’s films seem to dismiss them by branding them all “pretentious,” but it’s hard to imagine anyone trying to make that charge stick to his next project, the upcoming Judd Apatow-produced stoner flick Pineapple Express.
Even if Pineapple Express turns out to be less than amazing, (which, judging by the trailer, seems impossible), DGG should be applauded for stepping out of his comfort zone, which is something that a lot of other talented young directors seem unable to do right now (Wes, I love you, but seriously). If you have 89 minutes to spare while you’re waiting for the film’s August release, you might as well check out Green’s gorgeous debut feature, George Washington, made when he was just another 25-year-old kid coming out of art school and hyped up on Terrence Malick.
George Washington follows a group of kids as they wander listlessly around their crumbling North Carolina town, exploring abandoned buildings and hotwiring cars. The film is filtered through the consciousness of the kids, and so the things that matter to them (like 13-year-old Buddy’s break-up with his girlfriend) are the major plot points of the film. Everything changes, though, when the kids become tangled up in a fatal accident, and they each find themselves coping with the situation in their own ways.
Nasia’s poetic but childlike narration and Tim Orr’s hypnotic and stunning cinematography draw obvious parallels to Malick’s Days of Heaven. But while Malick’s protagonist was a young girl coming of age in a decidedly adult environment, Green places the viewer almost exclusively in the kids’ world. The adults in the film are big, lumbering figures, characterized more like myths than actual people. In the opening voiceover, Nasia says, “The grown-ups in my town, they were never kids like me and my friends.” And although this chasm is always apparent, some of the most beautiful scenes in the movie are the rare moments when the adult world and the kids’ world bleed into each other.
All of the kids in the film are black except for Sonya (a blonde-haired little ragamuffin who is there throughout all the kids’ adventures even though she can’t be more than 9), but Green doesn’t make an issue of race at all. As someone points out on IMDB, “the film has been made and written so that every single character could be black or white, and none of the dialogue or storyline would need to be changed.” There’s something very refreshing about it. A different screenwriter might strain to find racial tensions in the town, bring them to a boil and exploit them for some big dramatic conflict, but Green isn’t interested in doing that. Instead, he paints an intimate and moving portrait of camaraderie in a small town that is struggling just to hold itself together.
The ending is ambiguous, and the film doesn’t really come to any conclusions, or at least not the kind of gift-wrapped morals that some viewers might expect. This is not that kind of a movie, and it never tries to be. Although there are moments when the acting falls a little short or the dialogue feels a bit stilted, on the whole George Washington is a beautiful, affecting film. Like Malick’s best films, it unfolds like a dream—albeit a slightly disturbing one.
(Image courtesy of glennkenny.premiere.com)
3 Comments
May 21, 2008 at 5:11 pm
i put it at the top of my netflix queue
i’m excited
June 6, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Just curious: what do you make of All the Real Girls? I absolutely adore that film, would love to teach it — but my wife suggested that my students might lynch me if I did that. What say you?
June 21, 2008 at 11:14 am
I’m torn on that movie. I absolutely love the first half and think that part is better than anything in George Washington. But I kind of have issue with the second half of All The Real Girls (SPOILERZ, guys) because the things Zooey D’s character does (cheating on him, and then hanging around with “Bust-Ass”) seem more like plot contrivances than things her character would actually do. There’s not enough motivation for her to change so much…which kind of makes sense since we get the whole thing through his point of view. But still, I was disappointed in what he ended up doing with her character; she didn’t seem “real” enough to me, I guess. I need to see it again though, because there are parts of it that I totally loved.