The first mark of a good
filmmaker is to make good images, ones that
are as indelibly his own as his signature and
that embody a worldview—images that are
as revelatory about what is seen as about the
seer; that conjure a sense of life beyond the
frame, both as a synecdoche for a whole world
and as an implicit image of the filmmaker and
his range of experience. It’s from its images that
Matthew Porterfield’s first feature, Hamilton,
got my attention, and the way it did so—and
the way that this experience fits into the career
of the movie overall—should strike fear into
critics and programmers alike.
In 2006, Hamilton was booked in a series of
premières at Anthology Film Archives. As I
looked through the venue’s printed catalogue, I
was struck by the naturalness and the relief (the three-dimensional suggestion) of the photo
used to illustrate the title, and I contacted the
publicist there to request a screener. No sooner
did I begin to watch it, that very night, than I
recognized, from the shot used in the credit
sequence—of a boy riding through the frame,
crossing a street adorned with greenery and
broken asphalt—that its director, whose name
was unfamiliar to me, is a master of the art.
As the film unfolded, I was increasingly
impressed, delighted, astonished by
Porterfield’s amazingly simple yet dynamic
compositions; and several sequences—one
that features children on a set of swings, in
two shots where the rhythms of their rising and falling arcs go in and out of sync like a
visual version of music by Steve Reich, and
another, of a young man’s trip, en route home
from work, in a single long pan shot that carries
him through a wooded park that is seemingly
transformed into a primordial forest—struck
me as anthology pieces for the great volume
of exemplary scenes in the history of cinema.
And my ecstatic amazement at Porterfield’s
artistry was soon shadowed with shock upon
learning of the film’s absence from such prime
independent-film showcases as Sundance and
New Directors/New Films—and then, for that
matter, at recalling my own recent near-miss
of the film and the spotty, hedging coverage
in most other publications. Few stepped up to
acknowledge the grand accomplishment of
this small-scale, low-budget film.
That week, I caught a screening of Hamilton and have seen it many times since then;
and, over time, other aspects of the film have
come to the fore, alongside Porterfield’s keen
sense of composition, and, in the process,
have revealed its creation to be all the more
wondrous.
Hamilton presents Lena, a young woman who
wants Joe, the young man who is the father of
her infant daughter, to visit them before they
head off the next day for a trip to see relatives
out of state. The title of the film is the ethnically
mixed, economically modest, surprisingly
wooded Baltimore neighborhood where the movie takes place, and, without a trace of
sociological sermonizing or sample-seeking,
Porterfield (who grew up there) tells his story by
way of a frank and avid embrace of the locale’s
spectrum of life. He imbues the movie with all
kinds of work (Joe mows lawns; Lena works in a
bakery, where she fills and tends an industrial strength
mixer)—the physical particulars of a
job, the inevitable relations with a boss, and
even the routine contingencies of travel to and
from the workplace. He pays attention to the
demands of domestic life, including laundry
and child care; to the complex and tangled
ties of family and extended family (Lena and
Adeline live with Joe’s family, from which, for
unspecified reasons having to do with the
question of his “responsibility,” he is estranged);
to the bonds of friendship and the ties of
community, from the private sharing of secrets
among young women at a creek in the nearby
park to the public affirmation of churchgoing)
and, for that matter, to the neighborhood’s
untroubled diversity, by way of Joe’s family (his
half-sisters are African-American, as are Lena’s
closest friends).
Quite as importantly, Hamilton catches, with
a quiet assurance, the wide range of moods
that fill a single day and night, opening with
the adolescent romanticism of Lena’s break-in,
with her friend Brianna, to the basement
room where Joe lives, and including the instant
nostalgia for the shimmering water and misty
air of long summer days, the daily ecstasies
of free time and stolen moments (whether on
a trampoline, in a swimming pool, in a yard
roughhousing with a dog, on a set of swings, or
in a nearly-empty bar by day where a guitarist
cuts loose), or the disturbing—and disturbingly
authentic—blend of intimacy and remoteness
of the young couple’s nighttime encounter.
Showing young women looking at forgotten toys and family photos, orterfield imbues his
characters, and indeed the entire film, with the
sense of a life that’s mbued with the past.
The film’ exquisite sensitivity to the particulars
of place, and, for that matter, of light—and here
much credit is due to the cinematographer,
Jeremy Saulnier—suggests Porterfield’s alertness
to the deep inner imprint made by
landscape and locale, by the sense of wonder
and surprise that he brings to houses and
streets that usually become familiar to the
point of oblivion. For that matter, the movie
has an assured sensuousness—when Joe’s
great-aunt cuts flowers in her garden, a viewer
can smell the flowers; when Joe lights up a
cigarette in a car, a viewer may want to blow
away the smoke.
What’s remarkable about even the possibility
of an enumeration of such a range of inner
and outer events—and the reason why such an
enumeration is useful—is that Hamilton runs a
scant hour and its action unfolds with a serene
and ambling calm, shared by its actors (most
of whom are non-professionals), so that even
its climactic, brief and passionate chase scene
also onveys a contemplative tenderness that
will come as no surprise to those who have
heard Porterfield’s voice on the soundtrack of
his second feature, Putty Hill. His images indeed
reflect his world and himself. His unfolding of
a day’s events is more than a chronicle—it’s a
journal, comprising a panoply of feelings of a
novelistic nuance and amplitude that implies
the emotional fullness and richness of his own
daily life. It’s an awesome achievement for the
artist to convey it and a feat of daring for him
to reveal it; it’s also worth considering that
it may also be ineffably difficult, in its rapid
succession of exaltations and anxieties, for
him to experience it.
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Richard Brody is an editor and a writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.