BALLAST opens Vancity Theatre Vancouver

Exclusively at Vancity Theatre, Vancouver
Jan.30-Feb.2



Life and death on the Mississippi Delta
Film gets strong performances from a cast of non-professionals

By Jay Stone, Canwest News Service
January 30, 2009



BALLAST

****

Starring: Michael J. Smith Sr.,
Tarra Riggs, JimMyron Ross
Directed and written by: Lance Hammer
14A: violence, adult themes

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The low-budget movie Ballast is spare, unadorned, quiet and real. These might not be words that make you want to rush to the theatre, life itself being all those things and having the further advantage of being free. But Ballast is also a work of uncluttered art, a small film that accumulates all of the drama of moviemaking without hitting you over the head with it. It's a wonderful film, but it's not Batman.

It's more the Dardenne Brothers; first-time filmmaker Lance Hammer, who wrote, directed and edited Ballast, owes a debt to the Belgian brothers whose own movies have a similar sense of documentary discovery of lives on the gritty fringes. The fringe here is the Mississippi Delta, portrayed -- in a series of beautifully composed shots, including such evocative images as the unadorned bungalow in the rain, surrounded by a chain-link fence, with two artificial deer standing guard under the floodlights -- as flat, unfussy grasslands under a cold sky, with occasional mud patches. Ballast comes without a soundtrack or any notions of prettiness.

It begins in the darkened house of a large black man (Michael J. Smith, Sr.) who seems to be catatonic. His twin brother has just committed suicide -- we learn all this in passing, where much of Ballast is told -- and he tries to kill himself as well. These scenes, filmed (by cinematographer Lol Crawley) with a bouncy hand-held feeling of life actually occurring, start and stop abruptly. Hammer has no extraneous decoration in his filmmaking, and there is none in the performances either.

The man, Lawrence, lives in that plain bungalow, which is next door to another just like it, the home of his late twin. The other characters in Ballast are Marlee (Tarra Riggs), the brother's estranged widow, and James (JimMyron Ross), her 12-year-old son. They live in a nearby trailer surrounded, like much of the habitation in the film, with stray vehicles and small garbage dumps composed of old pieces of metal and burnt wood. Life in the world where Ballast is set is a mysterious wreck.

It takes a while to learn all this: Ballast is a quiet film, and even when it talks, it's not that easy to understand. It feels like mumblecore cinema, but we get the point. Lawrence is a large and generous man who has lost his spirit. Marlee is a single mom who cleans toilets -- we see her at work, scrubbing a urinal -- and James wanders the patchy fields, getting into trouble with a group of local drug dealers. He doesn't say much; when he needs money, he gets a gun and robs his uncle. He spends much of the rest of the movie eating junk food and watching cartoons on TV.

Much of the grim feeling of Ballast comes from the non-professional actors who nonetheless burrow into their characters and emerge, as the plot progresses, as people with believable pasts and with a hunger for a better life. Riggs is especially strong as the desperate mother, but Smith has a powerfully dignified screen presence and young Ross nails that 12-year-old unresponsiveness that you have to go to the movies to appreciate.

Hammer doesn't narrate as much as insinuate, and we learn of the history -- of a promising business getting by in a rundown part of America, of the ruination of drugs, of the various ways of killing time (video games, smoking, sleeping) that you can pick up when you don't have money -- as the film goes along.

Ballast picks up momentum, and while it is never what you would call an action flick, it does have the elements of grand drama. It's just that they happen quickly, like they do in real life, without preparation and without a soundtrack. Sometimes, they aren't even noticed: Ballast ends, like it starts, with an open-ended sense of possibility. This is life unfolding in space, both of them seeming more captured than choreographed.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun




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A change of view
Ballast director feeling better about U.S.

By Jay Stone, Canwest News Service
January 30, 2009

The day after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, a Los Angeles filmmaker named Lance Hammer woke up feeling disoriented.

"I'm kind of giddy," he said by phone from L.A. "I was such a cynic, and I have to recalibrate. I've suffered eight years of hell. We all have. I had such a hatred of our government. And because of that eight years, everything we've done is infused with this, including all artistic work. I think all American artwork contains this in some capacity."

Hammer has made one such feature film, a low-budget drama called Ballast. A winner of the directing and cinematography awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival, it tells the story of three people -- a lonely man, a single mother and her troubled son -- struggling to get by in the Mississippi Delta. Ballast is notable for its realistic setting and naturalistic acting: The main roles are all played by non-professionals, and Hammer allowed them to use their own words. It's also notable for a dark viewpoint that Hammer says is closely connected with the politics of the nation.

Hammer, 41, who wrote, directed, edited and produced Ballast, says he wrote it at a time when he was depressed because of personal reasons, but also because of his sense of futility about the U.S.

"It has been so depressing to be an American, to be stuck with that passport and to have no control over what this administration is doing to the world," he said. "I had such a sense of hopelessness. So many artists did. It'll be interesting 20 years from now for scholars to look back at the art that was created during this period and analyze that, but I have a feeling it's going to be a grim time. It'll be viewed as a grim time in art. Not that it's bad art. It's grim."

Hammer started on that road more than 20 years ago. He says he was 19 when he saw the ethereal Wim Wenders movie Wings of Desire -- about invisible angels who live among us -- and decided he wanted to become a filmmaker. He got there, but on an odd track: He went to architecture school and was hired by Warner Brothers as a designer. He created Gotham City for the superhero adventure Batman Forever, did digital design for Batman & Robin and was visual effects art director for the 1998 comedy Practical Magic.

The minimalism of Ballast is, to some extent, a reaction against all that. "I started becoming so frustrated with the lack of narrative substance and the lack of moral substance in these studio films, and so frustrated by an endeavour that is purely and nakedly and obscenely based on profit for profit's sake only, at the expense of everything else," he said. "I realized I needed to start writing myself to see if I could write my way out of that, and that writing was infused with that kind of frustration and defiance and desire to do something that's 180 degrees from that."

Ballast began when he visited the Mississippi Delta area in 1999 and felt a strange connection to the geography there; the movie is mostly his attempt to express that connection.

He began writing a script, but he knew from the start it would only be "a foundation that intuition could flourish upon." He wanted a naturalistic truth that he felt only non-actors could provide. After a long talent hunt, he hired performers and, with British cinematographer Lol Crawley, took them to the locations that had inspired his story.

He asked them to use their own words, and allowed them to change the scenario if it felt false to them. At one stage, as the filming was running out of time and money -- the budget is "under $1 million" -- Hammer allowed the actors to read the script once and then hand it back to him. They then got a quicker sense of what the scene was supposed to be.

The only problem he had was with the one professional in the cast, Johnny McPhail, who plays a helpful next-door neighbour. "That was the most difficult part for me because we had to remove all of the theatricality," said Hammer. "We spent a lot of time trying to get him to a place where he wasn't acting and he wasn't thinking about artifice. He was thinking about filtering artificial scenarios through his own emotional system."
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun