Putty Hill
Putty Hill deals
with the poor—the aimless lives of Maryland’s left-behind classes—yet
director Matt Porterfield and cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier choose a
gravely handsome style to show it. This is not the nightmarish
wretchedness that the liberal media loves about Winter’s Bone, where
hillbillies live in such dire conditions that they smoke dope, make
meth and spiritually cannibalize each other ("Keep buzzsawin’ them
metacarpals, honey!"). Putty Hill is a more refined—and
puzzling—version of poverty porn. The anthropological instinct that ages
ago produced astoundingly beautiful images of custom and nature, like
Robert Flaherty’s The Louisiana Story, has warped into sophisticated condescension.
Porterfield
and Saulnier circle and question a group of young folks and a few
adults as they approach a memorial service for a local youth who has
OD’d. Through paintball games, idle TV-watching and slow rides to
no-place-special, fecklessness is styled to be memorably
photographic—not emotionally resonant. None of these mostly white
characters have been penetrated or shown realistically, including the
obese black woman in yellow overalls—an objet d’art outtake from TV’s Cops.
Gnomic
imagery like this is an arty-artifice, based in sociological
condescension. The lingering shot of laundry hanging and blowing in the
night wind is a permutation of a TV scripted reality show—a poor man’s
Pedro Costa. The impulse to turn poverty, disadvantage and
unsophisticated behavior into art rather than finding art within those
conditions feels decadent, not what David Gordon Green did with such
purity in George Washington.
Putty Hill shifts
irreversibly into phoniness with a tired old lady watching Reba
McEntire on TV, then a karaoke memorial service in a bar beginning with
"Amazing Grace." Next, the quasi- Southern denizens perform "After
You’ve Gone" then "I Am A Poor Wayfaring Stranger" then "I Will Always
Love You." That’s some jukebox, but that’s also some bullcrap.
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Putty Hill
Directed by Matt Porterfield
Runtime: 87 min.