Eye Magazine - Director Lance Hammer balances weight and wisdom with his modern Mississippi drama

 BY Adam Nayman   November 19, 2008 09:11

Director Lance Hammer balances weight and wisdom with his modern Mississippi drama
The title of Ballast refers to the extra weight taken on by ships to help them stay upright — and dumped once the boat reaches port. The fact that one can take Lance Hammer’s remarkable first feature as being as much about the need to take on weight as the need to discard it speaks to the movie’s exquisite balancing act between starkness and generosity, reserve and emotion, hope and despair.

Set in a small, unnamed Mississippi Delta town in the throes of a bleak winter, Ballast — which took the Best Director prize at Sundance — centres on Lawrence (the massive Micheal J. Smith Sr.), a former DJ turned convenience store owner shattered by the death of his identical twin brother Darius. The film opens with Lawrence’s attempted suicide and then crosscuts between his lonely convalescence and the lives of his estranged sister-in-law Marlee (Tarra Riggs) and her 12-year-old son James (JimMyron Ross). Both Marlee and James are too preoccupied with their own day-to-day struggles (tenuous employment in her case; gang violence in his) to mourn Darius, who is revealed to have been a deadbeat dad. It gradually becomes clear that the only real hope for healing lies in Lawrence’s willingness to step into the wreckage of his late twin brother’s life — which means, in some sense, becoming his own purposeful doppelgänger: the father James never knew.

“The idea of finding purpose by being of use to somebody is something that informs my ethical and spiritual view of the world,” Hammer says during a recent interview. “I don’t have children, but I’ve always thought that the great joy of being a parent is being useful to a child and protecting them for the future. What is a child, really, but potential? It’s an open road. It can go badly, or it can go very well. Your role is to protect that potential. That’s hope.”

Hammer, a former Hollywood art director with a background in architecture, acknowledges the correspondences between Ballast’s intertwined themes of forgiveness and utility and those of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s 2002 masterpiece The Son, which Hammer considers to be “a perfect film.” The director is less convinced, however, that his debut owes any real stylistic debts to the Belgian brothers’ oeuvre, as so many reviewers have suggested in their coverage of the film.

He’s correct on this point: Ballast doesn’t look like a Dardennes joint. In fact, its aesthetics scan as a novel mix of realism (location shooting, natural light) and a kind of rough-hewn expressionism that manifests in varied, beautifully oblique compositions and elegantly ragged cutting patterns (there’s that exquisite balance again).

The film’s editing strategies seem to be Hammer’s preferred subject of discussion, not only because he cut the film himself over a period of two years, but because he believes he only really located the film after the cameras stopped rolling.

“Continuity editing is something that’s very archaic,” he says. “We’ve moved beyond that. The human brain works in a way that’s very fragmentary, so I wanted to be able to use staccato cuts to play with rhythm — to play with acceleration and deceleration. And because our shooting process was so intuitive, we had so much improvised material that we kind of ended up finding the story in editing.”
The director is also eager to defer credit for Ballast’s visual impact to his cinematographer, Lol Crawley, whose work foregoes the kind of easy lyricism that skews so many well-meaning indies towards beauty-in-desolation fatuousness. “Every image had to have a human being doing something in it,” Hammer explains. “Even if they’re just doing nothing. I cut out all the more obviously lyrical stuff because it seemed superfluous or gratuitous, and because it didn’t really say anything about the Delta.”

This idea of “saying something about the Delta” has been a sticking point for the film’s few detractors, who’ve grumbled that a white, Los Angeles–based filmmaker has no business making a film about Mississippi’s black underclass. (The main characters are all African-American, which is not a small detail but also hardly the point of the film.)

“It’s bullshit,” says Hammer, who developed the script after spending time in the region, and cast the film largely with members of the local community. “That’s basically asking for [artistic] segregation, which is racist and stupid.”

For the most part, however, he’s has been very pleased with the critical reaction to Ballast, especially in his capacity as the film’s distributor. (Hammer opted out of an agreement with IFC Films earlier this year.)

“Because we don’t have a lot of money to spend, what critics have said [provides] the core of our marketing effort,” he says. “It’s expensive to buy an ad in a major daily newspaper, but a good review is free. We got a great review from Manohla Dargis in The New York Times that took up half a page, and a full page ad [there] costs something like $130,000. So that’s just smart marketing.

“Making your first film independently is about making a lot of mistakes and learning,” he continues. “That’s how the film was developed, how it was written, how it was produced and how post-production happened. So it follows that the distribution should be handled in the same way — with that same wonderful naïveté. Why wouldn’t you present the film to the world in the same way that you made it?”

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Ballast opens tonight at the Carlton Theatre
See Showtimes http://www.cinemaclock.com/aw/ctha.aw/ont/Toronto/e/Carlton.html