As the opening credits roll
for Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill, cinematographer
Jeremy Saulnier’s camera is
focused on an interior wall for a minute
or two, where we can see the indirect light of a fading sunset and hear the ambient
sounds of inner suburbia: birds singing,
dogs barking, someone implausibly playing
classical music, a mechanical whine that
might be a lawn mower or a chainsaw. It’s
an arresting beginning, likely to hypnotize
some viewers and drive others away. But if
you assume that Porterfield’s film belongs
to the contemplative, patience-challenging tradition of minimalist cinema, you’re only
partly right. When human beings appear
in the film for the first time, they don’t say
anything. A group of young people engages
in the simulated warfare of paintball,
somewhere in the woods, punctuated only
by the pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of exploding
paint pellets. Then and only then does one
of the defeated warriors, a sweet-faced,
longhaired teenage boy (James Siebor), slide
to the ground, remove his mask and begin
to speak directly to the camera, answering
questions from an unseen interviewer. Did
he like playing paintball? “I liked it a little.” Who are the other players? “Some of my brother’s friends.” Where is his brother? “He
died about a week ago.” When’s the funeral? “Tomorrow.”
All the questions that an ordinary moviegoer
might ask at this point are, in fact, exactly the
right ones.
Who is this kid talking to? What kind of film
is this, narrative or documentary? Is the
movie about the place—a scruffy, workingclass
neighborhood on the outskirts of
Baltimore—or its inhabitants or what
happened to the dead kid? The answer, I
suppose, is all of the above, and Porterfield
attacks his story directly, avoiding both
the clichés of Hollywood narrative and
the studied, artful obliqueness of so much
independent cinema. Instead of relying
on action and dialogue, Porterfield simply
has his characters tell us what’s going on:
A young man has died, and what we see in
Putty Hill are the ripple effects of his death
through his family, his circle of friends and
his neighborhood. How well you adjust
to this wall-breaking combination of
dramatic and documentary techniques will
probably determine how much you like the
movie.
This compelling and intimate portrait
of the kinds of working-class lives rarely
seen in American movies—which also
strives, through its style, its unaffected
performances and its mode of direct
address, to break out of the indie-film
audience ghetto—emerged from the
wreckage of a coming-of-age feature called
Metal Gods, which Porterfield had spent
three years preparing in the Baltimore
suburb where he grew up. When his funding
collapsed in 2009, he repurposed his cast
and crew into a collaborative, improvised
experiment, which was shot in 12 days and
based on a five-page treatment. I’m sure
Porterfield was sorry to lose Metal Gods,
but what he created in its place hints at an
entirely new direction for no-budget, DIY
American cinema, and he and the rest of us
now owe a strange debt to the investors who
pulled the plug.
As we meet the cast of characters
surrounding the dead Cory and get to know
the hard-scrabble places where he lived and
died, what emerges piece by piece is a highly
complex portrait—sometimes tragic, but also
sometimes almost idyllic—of a struggling but resilient community as it confronts an
all-too-predictable tragedy. Putty Hill has
almost the breadth and range of a classic
Robert Altman film and almost the intense
formalism of, say, Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I
Know About Her, but all of it compressed
into less than 90 minutes and focused on a
nearly invisible corner of an unglamorous
city. For all the film’s formal innovation,
what comes through most strongly is its
emotional honesty in portraying wounded
characters who are neither victims nor
anthropological specimens. When Cory’s
cousin Jenny (Sky Ferreira) belts a karaoke
version of “I Will Always Love You” at his
wake, the scene is devoid of satire or kitsch.
Instead, a superficial pop anthem becomes
a way of saying the unsayable, of expressing devastating heartbreak. If Putty Hill is not
yet widely recognized as a breakthrough
American film that depicts working-class
life with tremendous understanding and
no condescension, that says more about
our time—when independent film has been
pushed to the outer cultural margins and
the term “working-class” is generally
forbidden—than it does about this extraordinary work.
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Andrew O’Hehir is a senior writer for Salon.com He has also written about film,
books and culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post,Sight & Sound and
other publications.