Apparently I even have reviews about films I don't remember watching.
This is obviously a torrent of words, and was never edited in any sort of human way, but I'm just trying to put all these things I'm finding in a place, to maybe one day edit and make a little more readable.
So, apologies for the grotesque length of the run on sentences below. I clearly had a phase where I hated periods, and idolized dumb **** like the Beat Generations philosophy on every thought being worth recording. Definitely not, at least not in this case, but I could probably eventually salvage about 400 words out of this. Will need to track down the movie first and give it a rewatch before any retooling happens.
For many children, the whole notion of growing up seems like something that won’t really ever actually happen. It occurs so slowly that they hardly suspect that, day by day, it is already happening to them. They can’t truly envision turning into one of those people they see around driving cars, or working in offices, or crossing the street unaccompanied. Adults are an entirely different species from them, possibly the kind of thing that will one day be hatched from some alien pod while you sleep, and will replace you during the night before you wake. Where the child goes, God only knows, but it will certainly never be mistaken for this thing that is much taller, and can grow beards, is always napping, and has a head full of answers for the kind of things kids only have questions to. In short, the adult world is nothing for a kid to concern themselves with since, whoever they end up growing up to be, it clearly isn’t going to be them. Not really.
In the documentary, Rich Hill (named after the wrong-side-of-the-tracks town the movie almost solely exists in), we will follow the lives of three separate boys, all of whom are at an age where they have just stepped past the reaches of such illusions. They now realize that adulthood is something they can no longer dodge, and as they wander aimlessly down the dilapidated streets of their hometown, argue with their familes, light cigarettes in toasters, and struggle with how to fill their lives with meaning, there is a dawning on them that maybe this is all there is. That whatever answers adulthood supplies, they have already learned. Streets are in fact aimless.
There is no meaning to anything and so cigarettes will keep being smoked. It certainly seems that these are the answers provided to them by the lives of their parents, who they watch for signs to what their future might look like. One mother spends the entirety of her days laying in lightless bedroom in a medicated slumber. One father seems unable to keep a job due to his constant dreaming of becoming a Hank Williams tribute singer. Then there is the grandmother who simply does not have enough food stamps to bring home a four pack of energy drinks to her grandson.
This last one may seem a minor enough failure, but it hints at where one can find the root of all the problems at the heart of this documentary: poverty. When one does not have money, there is little chance to inspire hope for days any different than the ones at hand. Poverty breeds a monotony so sure footed that it seems possible for even boys this young to see their future clearly, and what they see should trouble them, since it appears no more fulfilling than the lost days they are enduring right now. Their fate is that nothing will really change; they will only get older, and sadder.
For a film with such a seemingly bleak outlook though, Rich Hill has a dreamy poetry to it at times, making it so that it would not be a stretch to call it a beautiful film. While it hardly ever flinches away from documenting the many dreary details that make up the lives of these children, the camera often captures a dream-like quality to the world that cocoons the dingy unkempt homes they live in and the television soaked afternoons they spend much of their free time enduring. Outside of the starkness of the interiors shown in Rich Hill we will be introduced to an equally dingy town, yet one that thrums with a sense of promise and childlike whimsy, regardless of how muddy the streets may be. This outdoor world plays like a distant memory that is unfolding in real time; like hazy remembrances of a childhood that is just about finished, but not quite. Carnivals, cartwheels, firecrackers and all other sorts of artefacts from this special time continue to flit past like ghostly recollections that have suddenly bubbled up to the surface of our memory. It creates a space where one can nearly feel the exhilaration once felt playing made up games out in the street, staying out as long as possible until called back inside by parents at the end of the day. Often, in the film, we will find this outdoor world of vanishing childhood, and the indoor world of looming adulthood will overlap and merge through the films elliptical editing, creating a tapestry of this strange netherworld that these children now exist in, caught between the world they are leaving, and the world they are foreseeing. The dizzy spinning of an amusement part ride, cuts to the mundane tumbling of clothes in a laudromat dryer. An afternoon of raiding the local store for an assortment of July 4th supplies, will have the thrill kicked out of it as we enter the bedroom of a depressive mother at the tail end of a four day nap, her child failing to wake her as fireworks crackle away outside. The temporality of these rose tinted moments becomes starkly realized each time they are grounded by these neighbouring moments of unfettered reality, and the lack of permanence that becomes reinforced through this layering of juxtaposed images will be where the poetry of the film can be found. The world is sad, but it’s sad because it’s so often beautiful, and one day, just like our younger years, it may all entirely vanish from view.
“Ain’t we too old for this?”, one of the boys at one point asks as he goes out trick or treating for Halloween. Smoking a cigarette, his Juggalo makeup only partially concealing his shadowy pubestache as he carries his pillowcase full of candybars through the dusk of this desolate town, this scene will provide us a concrete symbol of someone unsure of what they are even meant to be any more. There is a sense that he knows he has outgrown such childhood trappings as trick or treating, but his attempts at adulthood seem equally ill fitting. At one point, as the camera follows him on his trip from one neighbours door to the next, he begins to brag about the fact that he is now old enough that he doesn’t need adults to check his candy before he eats it. It’s an awkward assertion of his independence, one that could only be made by someone who still thinks like a child, and believes there is something brave in his facing potential razorbladed apples all on his own. There is a sad innocence to this statement, one that can make one worry that maybe he isn’t as prepared for adulthood as all of the cigarettes he smokes, and curses he swears, allow him to pretend that he is thinks he is. But then, before he can tidily sum up his talk about Halloween candy, his conversation takes an unexpected detour as he suddenly proclaims ‘I’m against rape’, and then begins to talk about how there are things that have happened to him in his life that he doesn’t like to talk about. It seemingly comes out of nowhere but for this boy there appears to be some close link with the kind of adulthood that allows one to boldly eat all the stranger supplied candy one wants, with the adulthood where one can still be helpless, still be a victim. There is a realization that the grown up world also has its boogeymen, and the film once again is blending the world of the child and the world of the adult in a way that strands us in a ghostly place where we feel like neither, but sense that maybe they are one and the same. It is a terrifying proposition when one is at that age, and they can now look to the world and realize how all of the adults that run it were once children, and maybe in many ways, still are. And soon it will be there turn, regardless of how little they have learned, or of how few hopes that they have for a decent future.