Weekly Review #15: Low Tide + Stop the Pounding Heart

Roberto Minervini explores subcommunities at the fringes of American society in Low Tide and Stop the Pounding Heart.

From Low Tide.

It is difficult to write about the films of Roberto Minervini without reference to the way they borrow from real life. In my review of The Damned, I discussed how even though this film was ostensibly a Civil War period piece, Minervini still brought his same documentary-like approach to the project. Rather than striving for period-accurate verisimilitude, Minervini aimed to do what he always does – be as true to the experience of his human subjects as he can. In a way, this is an impossible goal. The presence of the camera, the director and the need to invent will always lead you away from the ideal of a cinema that perfectly captures the truth of its human subjects. But the ambition to strive for that ideal is, to my mind, an admirable pursuit that leads to an invigorating style of making films. While narrative incongruities are bound to crop up when you are as dedicated to purely experiential cinema as Minervini is, the rewards of this way of making movies often outweigh the drawbacks.

So, on the occasion of the Roberto Minervini retrospective that Acropolis Cinema is currently hosting in Los Angeles, I figured I’d go back in Minervini’s filmography to discuss two films that will be playing in a double feature at Brain Dead Studios on June 21 - Low Tide and Stop the Pounding Heart. Respectively, these are the second and third films in Minervini’s Texas trilogy. Each of the films in the trilogy examines a different milieu in rural Texas on the outskirts of mainstream American culture. The cast in each of these films consists of non-professional actors who are playing versions of themselves. There is little-to-no scripting and these films are essentially improvisations based on actors’ real-life experiences. You might call these films documentary-fiction hybrids, but, as I indicated in my review of The Damned, applying labels to Minervini’s films is a fool’s errand.

This was my first time seeing Low Tide and, as I indicated at the start of this piece, it is difficult to write about the film without speculating on why this film feels more or less “real” than his subsequent films. While I am on the record as a proponent of using the term realism in film discussion, I also understand that the concept of realism, if presented without qualifications, can limit a discussion rather than opening it up to the film’s complexities. So while I would be happy to have a theoretical discussion about realism in film and how it relates to Minervini’s corpus, I feel that I should strive to be precise rather than polemical. Something about watching Minervini’s films puts me in a philosophical state of mind, but I acknowledge that the desire to philosophize can sometimes get in the way of examining the film itself.

Low Tide begins with our protagonist, a 12 year old boy (Daniel Blanchard) stumbling upon a snake while walking his bike on a field of dead grass. The snake starts to slither into a crack in the ground. Rather than exalt in his safety from this potentially venomous snake, the boy gets on one knee and reaches down to pull the snake out of the crack. Minervini’s camera lingers on the boy as he gently pets and caresses the snake. In a matter of moments, an action without any dialogue quietly conveys so much about our protagonist and his way of moving through the world. Part of what makes Low Tide such a tactile film is that most of the film consists of the boy navigating with his environment in a physical manner. The boy performs chores and errands for his mother (Melissa McKinney), who works as a nurse at an assisted-living-facility. In addition to his domestic duties, the boy continues to interact with all manner of wildlife including bugs, a neighborhood dog, cats behind a trailer window, his pet goldfish, the fish he catches on his line and eventually stabs on a rock. Through these encounters, we see the boy engage with a whole gamut of wildlife and from his interactions, we glean his emotional connection to the natural world. The film does not provide us with any kind of backstory regarding whether this interest in wildlife is some kind of wider passion that his mom knows about. We as the audience are left to fill in the blanks as to what might be motivating the boy’s predilection toward exploring the natural world.

What leads the film to feel so rich is that it consists of moments that you feel could not have been dreamed up by a filmmaker on his own. Mostly, these involve small-scale behavioral moments involving the child, including his interactions with animals, the way he traverses terrain, and how he pursues rest, leisure and emotional connection. Where the film falters are the few instances where I feel the shaping hand of the director more strongly. There is a party scene during the film that, for me, verges on the kind of sordid exhibitionism that Minervini sometimes flirts with, especially in his later film The Other Side.

The scene depicts a house party at the home of the boy and his mother. At the start of the scene, the boy is trying to get some rest in his room when a man comes into his room and tells him that he is going to help the boy “get tail.” After this man showcases the boy to a few much older women, the sad charade ends only for another man to force the boy to drink beer. As the boy retreats to his room, a fully naked woman jumps out at him and mumbles something about getting “fucked up.” Regardless of whether this bears a resemblance to any real experience of any of the actors, there is a strange sadism that I feel from this scene. It is almost as if Minervini is presenting this gallery of hedonistic revelers as some kind of second circle of hell that the boy has to struggle not to fall into. In presenting a fairly straightforward conceptual takeaway for this scene, Minervini abandons the ambiguity that is usually at the heart of his filmmaking.

On the whole though, Minervini tends to train his eye on the environmental and behavioral details that create such a vivid sense of time and place. Rarely does a film delve so consistently into the minutia of a protagonist’s life without veering into anything remotely resembling staged-drama. When a dramatically charged moment does happen later in the film as the boy drinks some bleach in an attempted suicide, it feels less like a point of thematic emphasis in the film and more like the terminus of a character arc that was not explicitly depicted. Minervini is presenting a film that, in the hands of another filmmaker, could provide a narrative to connect certain moments earlier in the film to this dramatic peak. But rather than providing those kinds of cause and effect links, Minervini prefers to show us the moments that fill so much of our lives even when we are on the verge of some seemingly climactic moment. While this might feel like a form of withholding from the audience, I think Minervini just prefers to demonstrate the limitations of the camera’s perspective and reflect the general ebb and flow of life; an ebb and flow that is not beholden to whatever internal dilemma that is percolating under the surface. Rather than building up to the big climactic moment with scenes of foreshadowing and deliberation, Minervini just slips it into a quotidian activity of the boy doing laundry. It is not so much that the moment is powerful because of its adherence to a real-life event. Rather, Minervini’s handling of the moment is an artistic assertion that feels truer to life because it is not the culmination of a film thematically organized around the suicide attempt.

From Stop the Pounding Heart.

With Stop the Pounding Heart, Minervini establishes another powerful portrait of a family and their immediate environment. The film observes a devoutly Christian family that lives on a goat farm. The children in the family are all home-schooled and there is no digital technology available in the house. In one scene, the mother of the family describes that the reason they homeschool their children is that they believe parents should be the ones to provide moral instruction to their children. The father of the family provides religious education through bible study, and informal discussions of Christianity between the parents and children occur throughout the film. If Stop the Pounding Heart feels more explicitly like a documentary than Low Tide, it is probably because there are so many communal processes examined in the film that feel like they would probably happen regardless of whether there was a camera around or not. A list of a few of these activities include: the parents’ homeschooling instruction, the milking of goats; the arrangement of wire fences on the farm; the mother’s responsibilities as an OBGYN nurse including assisting a live birth of a human child; the family selling goat cheese at a farmer’s market. I said earlier in the review that I would try to refrain from discussing the “realness” of these films, but rarely has a film given you such a thorough depiction of the various functions of a large family. Regardless of whether they are altering their family routine in response to the camera, the film presents a richly detailed tapestry of a bustling household’s idiosyncratic routine.

In addition to the documentation of familial roles, there is also that sore thumb of the narrative that sticks out from the trappings of documentary. I have seen various loglines and plot summaries of this film that say that the film chronicles a burgeoning romance between the teenage protagonist Sara (Sara Carlson) and an amateur bull-rider named Colby (Colby Trichell). While I definitely think that there is some degree of romantic interest, the film does not really fashion that interest into a full narrative in which Sara’s perceived internal dilemma is paired with some sense of concrete action. While this is not necessarily a problem on its own, it does lead to a kind of structural awkwardness in the film. Rather than building a notion of why these interactions between Sara and her brothers and Colby keep occurring, Minervini keeps including scenes of Sara taking her brothers for practice with Colby and Sara watching Colby ride bulls. It is not so much that these scenes are handled poorly, but rather that the seams of the fiction show in a way that Minervini does not properly account for. The only real turning point in this friendship between Sara and Colby occurs when Sara drops her brothers off and declines to hang out with Colby as he instructs her brothers. However, while the film loses something in its structural organization, it kind of stops mattering when Minervini presents some really captivating scenes of bull-riding and the attendant rituals that accompany the bull-riding, including religious instruction and group prayer. If you think of the milieu of the family and that of the group of bull-riders separately, each is handled with such sensitivity and attention to detail. It is only when these worlds collide that Minervini starts to raise structural questions that the film does not seem intent on answering.

The occasion of the double feature of these two films of Minervini’s Texas trilogy provides an opportunity to grapple with how each film deals with the perceived internal dilemma of its protagonist. While in Low Tide, it might not be fully clear to the audience that the boy is grappling with internal anguish until the moment of his attempted suicide, in Stop the Pounding Heart there are clear markers that Sara is wrestling with something. In one scene in which Sara and some of her sisters are discussing marriage, Sara is the only one who says she is not interested in marrying, leading one of her sisters to say she will become an old spinster. Sara takes offense to this comment and, from her response, we can start to build a notion that Sara’s retreat from Colby’s world might be leading her to question her involvement with boys. In the film’s final scene, Sara asks an anguished question to her mother about how she can be a good Christian. Sara’s mother soothes Sara and says a prayer asking for God to help her conflicted daughter. Whatever objections I raise to the film’s lack of narrative finesse kind of evaporate when faced with a moment of such beauty, tenderness and love. This moment is shot through with complexity due to the sense that, while the mother is so passionately supportive of her daughter, she also has a view of what it means to be a Christian woman that might be partially to blame for some of the daughter’s angst. I would have liked a more thoughtful approach to the fictional elements of the film, but then we might not have got that moving final moment. And this is the dilemma at the core of Minervini’s cinema – the more Minervini attempts to impose a fictional framework to the proceedings, the more likely he is to miss the moments that occur more naturally. But fictional elements are essentially necessitated by the presence of the camera and if those fictional elements are not effectively integrated into the documentation, you miss out on some emotional complexity. Whatever the limitations of Minervini’s cinema may be, he attains results that no other directors can get. That in itself is cause for praise.