Ray Pride

There are as many ways to say "I love you" as there are lovers, but here is my favorite way in ages, from writer-director David Gordon Green's remarkable, graceful and quietly dazzling directorial debut, "George Washington." In a verdant yet rusticated North Carolina backwater, a young girl looks on the boy she considers a repository of all manner future greatness, stares fixedly at him as she describes him to himself, ending her adoration with, "I hope you live forever."

The 24-year-old Green and his assured cinematographer, Tim Orr, are collectors of glowing images, nonjudgmental inhabitants of space. They have as much confidence in audiences as in their storytelling skills. Green's story is composed of vignettes, its flow unimpeded by too much plot, rich with intense performances. Several adolescents, some teenagers, mostly African-American, some white, talk about their lives while lives continue to spin around them, in the corners and background of the frame. The conversation is classic, unforced, beautiful yet ordinary. Flirtation, love, self-esteem, ambition, dashed lives, what it's like to love and long even when you are 9 or 11 instead of 24 or 54: all there, all spoken aloud. Green and Orr know how to take the measure of a face, speaking or not, and of the full moment a face deserves in motion, or still.

George (Donald Holden), is a quiet loner with a damaged skull; he's admired by Nasia (Candace Evanofski), who sees something magical in his stoicism -- "I hope you live forever" -- and breaks your heart with her chattiness, her glow, her capacity for love. George is another matter: a charmed, damaged child, whose actions contain salvation, redemption, and guilt unabiding. Another couple that winds up simply hanging out, sharing a love of grand theft auto, are the amiable Vernon (Damian Jewan Lee) and the self-critical Sonya (Rachael Handy). He's a big, dark guy; she's a tiny slip of a blonde, all of 9. The friendship is as natural as rain on water. Lisa Simpson-voiced, Sonya is a sallow afterthought escaped from Sally Mann's family photos, a sprite of this unimproved, overgrown landscape. The performances are transparent and wry, and wonderfully naturalistic. Considering reports that much of the film was improvised, the accomplishment is all the greater.

The palette of colors is splashed against a backdrop of vast yet stumpy greenery, ranging across range, brick and dark skin tones, suffused with the flat coprous-water color of a muddied stream filled with those about to be baptized. (Another simple scene of understated beauty.) Green and his gifted collaborators understand the absurdism of the matter-of-fact. Theirs is a tender lyricism that illuminates the gothic turns of the plot sidelong. It would be easy to slather on the parallels to the work of others, or, considering the youth of its makers, the influences, but this is an American original.

There is dialogue to quote for days. Of a mother's love: "I mean, she'll knit you a sweater if you even shiver, you know what I mean?" Sonya has a speech of intent self-judgment that had me awestruck, as beautiful as the timeless three-minute monologue about life and pets by the eldest woman in Errol Morris' "Gates of Heaven." A mess of a room: "Look at this place! It looks worse than two tornadoes went through here!" And more of love: "I mean, she had this glaze in her eyes that made me tingle all over." Listen to the way those words are spoken: true, not precious. And more breathtaking is a lengthy version of the archetypal southern monologue, not of literature, but of every conversation that circles long enough, late enough, "I wish I were in China... I wish there were 200 of me." And the sound design: just listen to one scene alone; the lanky clangor of boxcars ambling relentlessly over a crossing.

Come to think of it, someone should set Green and Orr loose with an IMAX project: Someone has to become a visionary of this overpowering medium, and they're the closest, in this 35mm CinemaScope project, to having the kind of drenching sensation of a world lived which that format intends but has never truly accomplished. But for now, we have the gift of "George Washington." Intimate yet magnificent, in eighty-nine minutes, we are given a world, and it is peculiar and noble, and filled with the humid, languid sensation of summer days whiled away in sweet humidity. The words we hear from the words of these endlessly curious children are like the articulate, extemporaneous wisdom of the colloquial that is neglected on screen, but not the back streets of the great, great American South. So much love, so much curiosity, so much beauty. This is what you miss if your eyes and ears are not open; this is what a movie like "George Washington" asserts and reveals and makes lasting poetry of, defining life in a way I would summarize in three simple words: Strange things happen. (2000-10-05)

Also by Ray Pride

RAGING HORMONES
Karyn Kusama's "Girlfight" has made the festival circuit, from Sundance to Cannes to Toronto, garnering awards (two at Sundance, for best dramatic feature and direction), and it has sparked several fundamental forms of discussion, but it possesses an emotional ferocity, a narrative polish and an attentiveness to gesture and an actor's charisma that is rare and thrilling. You have not seen this film before.
(2000-09-28)

THE WHITE ALBUM
Writer-director Cameron Crowe has at least one infernal phrase to his credit: "Show me the money!," anyone?
(2000-09-14)

IN THE COMPANY OF RENEE
If "Nurse Betty" were directed by an unknown, its dark comedy and sunny-dispositioned star would probably make it a critics' favorite.
(2000-09-07)

VOICES CARRY
Let's say the first glory of Irish literature is the fact that a recognized artist doesn't pay any income tax. The second glory is the prose that flows free into the rest of the world.
(2000-08-24)

BENT
(2000-08-17)

KISSER OF MEN
(2000-08-17)

WINONA WEPT
(2000-08-17)

MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISARRAY
(2000-08-03)

AMERICAN CUTIE
(2000-07-20)

EYEBALL KICKS
(2000-07-06)

HOLLYWOOD'S LONELY MAN
(2000-07-06)

RIDERS ON THE STORM
(2000-06-29)

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