There are interesting comparisons to be made between “Sons of Perdition,” reviewed above, and “Putty Hill,” a film about slackers and druggies living in a Baltimore neighborhood, which also opens today. Both deal with disaffected American young people, uneducated and sometimes naive, but also depressed, looking for a way out and almost ready to be seduced by a savior armed with many promises.
The movie runs through the weekend as part of the Webster University Film Series.
Matt Porterfield wrote and directed, with wonderful, moving, effective photography from Jeremy Saulnier. The kids, mostly teenagers and 20-somethings, are not actors, with one exception, and they interviewed during the days leading up to a funeral for Cory, one of their friends though, oddly, no one seems to have known him very well. The boys and girls talk, swim, hang out, drink, take some drugs. They don’t go to school, they don’t work, they show little ambition or desire to get out of the tumbledown neighborhood.
Like the youngsters from Utah in “Sons of Perdition,” they offer few signs of real life.
Spike (Charles Sauers) is the only person in the film who seems to have a job. He’s a tattoo artist, and he talks frankly about his background. He’s just out of prison after serving many years for second-degree murder, a crime committed for revenge against the man who raped his pregnant wife. But Spike is happy to be on the right side of the law. His niece, Jenny (Sky Ferreira, a country singer) is a sullen, unhappy blonde.
Eventually, the wake is held, with a karaoke machine in a disheveled bar, but no one seems to know what to say or do. It’s like watching an old-fashioned record-player whose turntable slows and slows and and finally stops.
Porterfield mixes truth and fiction nicely, but the power of his film, as in “Sons of Perdition,” lies in its disturbing, distressing portrait of young Americans, uneducated, unemployed, unmotivated, almost ready to march to an empty tune sung by a leader who might be extremely dangerious.
Putty Hill opens today and runs through Sunday at the Winifred Moore Auditorium at Webster University
–Joe