by Sam Juliano
Shot with a cast of non-professional actors and using an unsteady hand-held camera, director Lance Hammer has created in his new film Ballast an earthy realism that has ushered in a new kind of American cinema. This non-linear kind of filmaking is far more interested in establishing place, tone and textures and a sure sense of alienation, disconnect and loneliness, in this case set in an impoverished hamlet in the Missisippi Delta. At the outset the camera follows a boy of about twelve named James, as he watches a torrent of geese flying overhead; the boy’s seemingly aimless and meandering movements eventually yield to revelations that he lives with his working mother in a trailer and he rides around in a motorbike dealing with crack pushers and other riff raff. In any cast the opening shot is superb as it visually captures the boy’s essential diacotomy: a calm exterior conceals inner turbulance.
We learn almost immediately that a double suicide attempt among two brothers, Lawrence and Darius results in the death of the latter and the miraculous survival of the former, a burly bear of a man whose role through the film anchors its emotional center. He reacts stoically when his delinquent nephew attempts a few times to rob him of his meagre possessions by aiming and holding a gun on him. And he quietly stands firm against the continual verbal attacks of his embittered sister-in-law, Marlee, who thinks the world is against her after her husband’s suicide. She blames Lawrence for the situation they are all in, yet she eventually comes to realize the dire position that all are in, and her salvos are out of real urgency rather than forced melodramatics. (more…)
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