The
American independent film movement has been dominated over the past half-decade
by slightly quirkier, more ramshackle versions of what's on broadcast
television any given night of the week. Festivals and art-houses are jammed
with style-poor movies about dysfunctional families and vaguely disaffected
youngsters, all of whom seem to have strange hobbies, horrible fashion sense,
and a knack for talking only when they have something nonsensical and/or pithy
to say. So given the competition, it's easy to cling fast to a film like Lance
Hammer's debut feature Ballast, which is all about atmospheric mood-spinning, and clearly
aspires to a higher form of art. But though Ballast has more in common with the austere
foreign cinema of the Dardennes brothers than it does with Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, or Napoleon Dynamite, Hammer's small-town
wallow—in which characters suffer in stillness and silence—is
itself a kind of art-house cliché.
There's a
terrific short film buried in Ballast. Michael J. Smith Jr. plays a hulking Mississippi
convenience store owner who reacts to the suicide of his twin brother by
retreating into stasis. Then out of the blue, the dead man's ex-wife Tarra
Riggs and drug-addicted son JimMyron Ross show up at Smith's doorstep, asking
for a place to stay and a piece of the business. Smith and Riggs have never
liked each other, but they both think that Ross—who has gotten on the bad
side of some local drug dealers—deserves a chance to turn his life
around, so they commit themselves to home-schooling him, while dancing
tentatively around the idea of sharing a life together.
Hammer has
a nice eye, and his premise develops engagingly in the final half hour, as he
raises provocative questions about whether one man can truly step in for
another. But it takes the poignancy of the final scenes to redeem what comes
before. For most of its first hour, Ballast stays in "guy walks around" mode:
Smith and his makeshift family amble from one crummy-looking Delta location to
another, occasionally mumbling a line of dialogue that gives neither the
audience nor the other characters any useful information. Granted, Hammer is
conducting a spiritual inquiry here, examining the lives of those who've
committed themselves to being lonely. Ballast means to capture the rhythms of
everyday life, among people who've lost the knack for social interaction. But
even in everyday life, folks tend to be a lot better about getting to the
point.