For this week’s TRIBUNE : Lance Hammer’s BALLAST [7/10]

Published on: March 16th, 2011

Ballast
Director: Lance Hammer

Regular readers of Tribune over the past couple of years may have noted several references to Lance Hammer’s low-key American independent film Ballast. The most recent was in September, when while reviewing Debra Granik’s (subsequently multi-Oscar nominated) Winter’s Bone, I compared it (unfavourably) to Hammer’s “direct, uncompromised tale of family dysfunction and social injustice in the Mississipi delta – which won two prizes at Sundance in [January] 2008 among countless gongs around the world’s film festivals, but … somehow never got its chance in UK cinemas.”

Well, three years and two months after that Sundance unveiling Ballast – which had its British premiere at the London Film Festival in November ’08 – finally “gets it chance”, courtesy of distributors Axiom Films. As a rough rule of thumb, such frustrating delays are usually a fair indicator of high quality – as with two of last year’s Tribune top ten, Involuntary and Frownland. And while Ballast may not emulate those pictures by being ranked at year-end among 2011′s very finest releases, it’s certainly a key film of the week and also of the month. Indeed, if anything its examination of financially-straitened “ordinary” Americans being even more topical now than when writer/director/editor Hammer started work on his debut feature in the middle of the last decade (“I am a little bit less optimistic for the U.S. economy than most people are currently” – George Soros, 9th March 2011.)

Having seen his film picked up during Sundance by leading US-indie distributor IFC, Hammer – unhappy with their release-plans – later “bought back” the rights and tried to distribute it himself – with what were reportedly (and, given his film’s content, ironically) ruinous results, an unfortunate end to what was seen as a crucial test-case for the viability of self-handled independent productions.

The story begins after the shotgun suicide of Darius, a African-American in his thirties who’d run a roadside general-dealer store – in a notably underpopulated area of the delta – with his hulking, taciturn twin Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Jr). The grief-stricken Lawrence tries to take his own life – but survives, and after various dramas ends up forming part of an ad-hoc “family” unit with his teenage nephew James (JimMyron Ross) and James’s mother Marlee (Tarra Riggs). Lawrence and Marlee re-open the family store, all the while trying to keep James – who has become involved with local drug-dealers – out of harm’s way…

The travails of cash-strapped African-Americans are seldom tackled in any kind of US cinema, though Ballast‘s adult protagonists - as proprietors of a small (if struggling) business – aren’t especially representative of the wider socio-economic issues which the film touches upon. Nevertheless, writer-director Hammer executes proceedings with an absorbing austerity that’s entirely appropriate for the stoic doggedness displayed by his characters, eliciting believable, almost documentary-style performances from his small (non-professional) cast.

It’s also to his credit that he carefully avoids the kind of melodramatic (and invariably gun-centric) denouement which often mars such forays into damaged, marginalised lives. The result is a very understated affair – indeed, the dialogue is often quiet to the point of semi-inaudibility – which amply repays the close attention it demands. It helps that the cinematography is such a consistent downbeat joy, Shrewsbury-born Lol Crawley – also responsible for Duane Hopkins’ Better Things and Chris Morris’s 4 Lions) – exploring a colour-palette of slate greys, cobalt blues, and brackish browns. “Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds,” as Missouri’s very own T S Eliot once wrote, in a somewhat different context.

Neil Young
8th March, 2011
(written for the 16th March edition of Tribune magazine)