Ballast, which was made in rural Mississippi with a small cast of non-professional actors, most of them African-American, begins with Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Sr.), who is discovered sitting in his living room in shock, with the body of his twin brother, a suicide, lying in bed in the other room. For a while, the movie cuts back and forth between Lawrence's sad story and the troubles of twelve-year-old James (JimMyron Ross) and his indulgent single mother Marlee (Tarra Riggs), without at first making it clear how their lives are connected. Bored and lonely, James hooks up with an older group of drug dealers and begins making drops for them on his bike. He also acquires a gun and begins seriously acting out, at one point barging in on Lawrence in his home and robbing him, though Lawrence is so far lost in his depressive misery that it feels a little off applying so active a verb as "robbing" to anything that could be done to him; sticking a gat in his face is like yelling at a dead dog to heel. Eventually, things go very wrong with James and his new friends, and as the increasingly desperate Marlee begins to flail out looking for a way to keep herself and her son safe, the central trio collide with a bang.
Ballast won awards for its first-time director, Lance Hammer, and its cinematographer, Lol Crawley, when it played at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and it has since gone on to become one of the best-reviewed movies of the year. I was eager to see it myself, partly because I grew up in rural Mississippi myself, and the world this movie touches on doesn't show up in movies that often. Crawley gives the back country landscape a blue-tinged loveliness that's very easy on the eyes but is also a little at odds with the uninflected, "natural" performances of most of the male cast members. The world of this movie doesn't bear much connection to the Mississippi I know, not because there's no visible resemblance between the two, but because the movie feels airless and stylized and as devoid of any sense of ongoing life as a diorama. Yet at the same time, Hammer, who invokes Robert Bresson in discussing his intentions, seems to mean for his nonprofessional cast to bring something to the screen that's more "real" than trained actors can. Though it may be blasphemous to say it, Bresson himself wasn't always able to get what he needed out of the supposedly pure, malleable untrained actors he came to favor, and Hammer hasn't yet had the experience that Bresson had wracked up before he started treating the casting of non-actors as an essential part of his "transcendental style." Here, Micheal J. Smith has a solid dignity that isn't always enough to hold the screen but does translate into a respectful admiration for his character. But young JimMyron Ross has no idea how to communicate whatever is supposed to be inside his troubled character, and Hammer has no idea how to guide him. If the viewer is pure-hearted and sympathetic enough to have no end of intrinsic sympathy for a lost, fatherless kid who likes to wave guns around, lies all the time, and stupidly stirs up trouble that puts the people who care for him in mortal danger, that might not be a problem, but for the flawed mere mortals among us, watching this little punk who has no depths of inner life that the camera can pick up on run amok creating plot complications can get old fast. Tarra Riggs, who has won roles in a few other pictures since making her movie debut here, gives the movie's most nuanced performance, but even her work suffers a little because of the writer-director's failure to really get a handle on the kid at the center. This woman is supposed to have a past history of substance abuse, and she's supposed to be hard-headed and self-sufficient enough to have gotten past that and made a living for herself and her boy by scrubbing urinals. But she never suspects that her acting-out little snot of a son might be involved with drugs, even after her starts turning up with bruises on his face. For the first half of the movie, she's so sweet and reasonable beyond the call of duty that she seems delusional, and there's so little preparation for her flaring up emotionally after things turn bad that she seems deranged.
It's nice to see a movie whose characters qualify as "the working poor" that actually seems to be set in the same economic world we live in: no Hollywood screenwriter would be constitutionally capable of writing the scenes in which James tells his mother that he needs twenty dollars for school or a hundred or so dollars to get right with the drug dealers, and she reacts as if she couldn't imagine earning that much extra cash in a single lifetime. But a lot of Ballast falls solidly in the "worthy" category. Pauline Kael once said that one of the few ironclad rules about movies is that the good ones never leave you feeling virtuous, and by the time that the catatonic Lawrence, whose dog was taken in by a neighbor after its grieving owner went off the deep end, goes to fetch the animal so that he can use it to bring James out of his shell, virtuousness is just what the film seems meant to embody. It's artful and well-meaning, but there may also be some condescension built into its joyless depiction of the tragic zombie lives of the underclass. The Delta setting may be a hint that Ballast is meant as the cinematic equivalent of a blues song, but if it is, it's the kind you get from the academic appreciators of the form who don't get that the term "the blues" describes the state that the music itself is supposed to lift you out of.