Lake City

Contributed by Mike Fishman

Once in a while a movie comes along that is not great, but fine. Perhaps flawed, but leaving you with matter, something of substance and personal meaning, to think about. A silence, like the kind of silence that might come over you standing before a painting you get lost in, say a Mark Rothko or a Jackson Pollack. Such a movie for me was Lake City, written and directed by Hunter Hill and Perry Moore. Not truly great, but fine, and fine turned out to be more than enough pay-off when I decided to take a chance and catch it at The Quad Cinema (despite an unfairly weak review in the NY Times, leading to the film closing after one week) and finding myself in a theater with only two other patrons.

Because of that review, I had extremely low expectations, but something about the plot of a Southern mother (Sissy Spacek) and son (Troy Garity) reuniting years after a family tragedy, the son now on the run from drug dealers, drew me in. And very quickly, and to my surprise, I found myself caring about these characters, mostly due to Sissy Spacek being so good, so honest in her acting. The film was made better than the sum of its parts by the sheer will of her performance. When she is quiet, she is utterly believable as a quiet person, the solitude of the character not forced upon us.

Some of the dialogue was uninspired and bordered on cliché, and the film moved to a violent climax rather than an emotional one. And while this was in some ways disappointing (I was very much aware of myself practically willing the film to an emotional climax), I didn’t feel it failed me. Rather, it went somewhere other than where I wanted it to go. But that only served to remind me of the emotional territory films can go, but rarely do. And how, when they do go there, it is often through the vehicle of an actor we know too well, have seen one too many times before, making the suspension of disbelief a little bit harder. Not having seen Sissy Spacek in some time, this was an easy hurdle to overcome. And so, even though that emotional (climactic) moment was not delivered, the movie as a whole was like hot chocolate on a blustery day (just to be reminded of the power of film to deliver those moments, even when they elude us) because, with the exception of Rooster’s Breakfast, it’d been a long time since I’d actually been moved by a film.

While there have been some great dramas in the past six months or so, Hollywood and otherwise, none presented me with a set of characters and a situation that I could connect to, in a personal way. But in Lake City, I could, since at the core of the story is the death of a child, the loss of a brother: the moment of learning about that loss, and the anger such a moment engenders. The thrashing out at a world that delivered such a moment, and the living, every day from that point on, with that moment, with that loss.

A film that can touch upon death in a way that does not feel artificial naturally has the potential to be a powerful and profound experience. That Lake City dwelled in that emotional space, while not fully going there and occasionally feeling forced, made it a film that resonated within me, and that preoccupied me for the following few days. There’s not much more you can ask from a film. It’s certainly part of what motivates me to go to certain types of quiet films, that might have gotten poor reviews; to go on a whim that there just might be something there for me, even if it wasn’t there for the reviewer.

A film doesn’t have to be great to deliver like that, just fine and fine enough, and the viewer receptive enough. The shame here is that there was much for me and there could be much for others, but because of that darn review, Lake City closed after only one week, and I am unable to encourage others to see it in the theater. That’s a shame but hopefully this deserving film will find its audience through DVD.