Seeing this film at the Tribeca Film Festival with a group of friends was less an outing than an anthropological experiment.  Three of us, all Southerners, had seen Dancing Outlaw and its lamentable sequel several times and were fairly well prepared for what awaited us.  Our guests, however, were not.  A Yankee, a Londoner, and a curious Dutchman (sounds like the beginning of a “walk into a bar” joke, no?) had no idea what they were about to see.  We worried if they would get through it.

The Wonderful Whites dispenses with charm and replaces it with oblivion. The White family live chaotic and violent lives.  Against the backdrop of a depressed coal mining town, this large family, their relations often complicated by infidelity and questionable parentage, buy cocaine, snort painkillers, drink, smoke, give birth and get arrested with alarming frequency.  But sloppy parties and atavistic fights are just as prevalent as introspective monologues in which the characters comment earnestly on their dissolute lives.  They’re poor, they’ve always been poor, and they’ll continue to be poor.  None of them seems to possess any education beyond elementary school and the only one with a job is Poney, the one who left Boone County and fled to Minnesota where he maintains a normal life with his family and works as a house painter.

Director Julien Nitzberg, associate producer of Dancing Outlaw, carries this all off without a hint of exploitation.  Nothing seems forced or staged, likely because it doesn’t have to be.  The Whites do well enough to unconsciously lampoon themselves, and that’s what ultimately makes this film a success.

The entire family is utterly unconscious of larger social norms and that gives them the freedom to break them often, mostly while drunk, high, or a combination of both.  Though they’re keenly aware of their infamy in the county, they simply don’t care and will do whatever they choose, regardless of the consequences.  That reckless carefree attitude is born from a shared fatalism; they all know they’re going nowhere but seem in an awful hurry to get there.

Actually, the trailer makes it look a lot like a horror movie.  It’s not.

To say that director Martin Ritt plays it safe here is an understatement.  In 1958, a big budget movie about the South knew better than to touch on the issues of social and racial inequality that course through Faulkner’s work.  Ritt crafts a safe, “Sunny South” version of Faulkner with jovial black servants and scores of drawling but affable locals.  He hasn’t quite translated Faulkner to the big screen so much as he has sanitized him and extracted from his revolutionary fiction what amounts to little more than a gassy boy-meets-girl story.

Summer tells us less about Faulkner than it does the society that gave birth to it.  Ritt, once an accused communist whose schooling at North Carolina’s Elon University shocked him into a fascination with the rigidly stratified South, leaves no hint of his personality on this film.  The whitewash of Faulkner’s South is so weak-kneed and treacly that at one point, Ben Quick compares the size of a bedroom in the Varner manse to the size of his entire family home, prompting the black house manager to nod in a sort of familiar agreement, a scene seemingly designed to cement a bi-racial “us versus them” approach to Southern poverty.  Modern viewers’ eyes will roll early and often.

Still, Summer’s box office and critical success speak volumes about the prevailing view of the South, at least in contemporary cinema.  Watching this film, one gets a feeling that “it’s not as bad as all that,” that the black underclass is perfectly content to serve the aristocracy, that the grinding poverty of rural whites consisted of little more than lazily chewing tobacco outside the general store, and that the lily white flower of Southern womanhood need only receive an injection of strong farm stock to rescue her from the effete man of the New South.

If it’s Faulkner you want, you’ll only find him between two covers.  The Long, Hot Summer, however, plays less like “Barn Burning” and more like Song of the South.  Skip this and see The Accountant. Twice.

View the trailer here.

Malcolm Gladwell: Film Buff

In a review aptly titled Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, philosopher and critic (and a man upon whose work much of my graduate studies orbited) Terry Eagleton says the following of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”  Much the same could be said of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent essay in the New Yorker (natch) entitled “The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and The Limits of Southern Liberalism.”

Before we go further, let’s accept that Gladwell, who Wikipedia refers to as “a British-born Canadian journalist, author, and pop sociologist” has likely never been to the South, save some airport-to-airport junket hawking his latest bit of pop-psych tripe.  We can be even more certain that Gladwell has never visited the South in question, that of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  Yet, Gladwell has managed to limn the crudest of understandings of Civil Rights-era Southern politics from Lee’s venerable novel and extrapolated from it the psychological makeup of Southerners.

Gladwell’s thesis is essentially this: that Atticus Finch, protagonist of Lee’s novel, was not a Civil Rights hero ahead of his time but a coward, a Folsomite, twiddling his thumbs while his fellow man endured unjust prosecution.  Rather, Gladwell would have preferred the bookish Atticus to at the very least stage a sit-in on the courthouse steps or even swashbuckle through the courtroom, pistols in each hand, prepared to go down in a blaze of glory for what he believed.

In short, Gladwell watched a movie, grossly misunderstood the social context in which it occurs, and ground out a ham-fisted essay in which his ultimate conclusion is that Southern liberalism is hamstrung by cowardice, and that is ever the way it shall be.

Perhaps most pitiable aspect of the article is that Gladwell seems to genuinely believe he has uncovered *gasp* that the Jim Crow South was an extremely unjust and unequal era in which to exist, and that’s putting it mildly.  My God, Gladwell has opened a veritable Pandora’s box of injustice — Tom Robinson’s innocence, Mayella’s machinations as well as incestuous relationship with her father, et al — all, presumably by reading To Kill a Mockingbird.  Well, let’s be fair — he’s less concerned about the novel than the movie — he rarely cites the text, opting instead to rely on Hollywood’s version of Atticus Finch to prove his point about Southerners.

Much of what I could say to impugn Gladwell’s argument has been said here and said well.  However, for argument’s sake I’ll throw in some anecdotal evidence as to just how naive and poorly formed Gladwell’s thesis is.

When my father was a small boy in the 1950s, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in his family’s yard.  No one was hurt and he, his father and his brothers doused the flaming cross with water quite immediately, but the sinister intent was not lost on them.  They were farmers of, among other things, cotton, and had contracted a black family to help them bring in that year’s cotton crop.  They housed the black family in their house, ate with them at the same table and generally treated them as neighbors treat one another when both parties have the good sense to see past race. Needless to say, someone took offense and by supper time a fiery cross lit up the windows of my grandparents’ front room.

Racial violence in the South was truly, horrifyingly real.  Gladwell seems to want Atticus Finch (or perhaps just Gregory Peck) to become some kind of John Brown, storming arsenals and making demands.  What he pathetically misunderstands is that yes, Finch is playing the game, but he’s playing the game in such a way that will keep the maximum number of people, both black and white, alive and unharmed.  Finch’s unwillingness to be a revolutionary figure seems to have damned all Southerners in Gladwell’s esteem as spineless, ambivalent twiddlers, more content to slowly schlep defeated out of a courtroom than to start a revolution.

Atticus Finch, Che Guevara though he was not, stood and continues to stand as a man who acted according to his beliefs and defied a system of repressive violence, putting his own well-being and that of his family at risk by doing so.  While Gladwell may want him to have started a revolution, Finch won a timeless, if bloodless victory, simply by being right.

I have to thank alert reader and dear friend since time immemorial Lindsey Carmichael for alerting me to this.  Even though it made me furious, I still adore her.

Now, I’ve made it sound like some ominous, doom-saying and finger-wagging slog that tolls the death knell for the rural South.  That’s far from the truth.  The Accountant is, at its core, a comedy.  Hell, it’s hilarious.  But as the old song goes, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.  The rural, small farming South is losing its once firm grip on its traditions, and has only itself to blame.  This very problem is embodied in the O’Dell brothers, one a strict traditionalist and fledgling farmer, the other a more progressive but not unsympathetic rationalist who seems to hold an ambiguous job in town.  Their family farm is in danger of falling into bankruptcy, and the accountant sees only one very macabre solution to its financial woes.

Ray McKinnon (you may know him from Deadwood or O Brother!) wrote, directed, and starred in what would win the Oscar for Best Live Action Short in 2002.  With his wife, Lisa Blount, Ray runs Ginny Mule Pictures, an entity about which there is frustratingly little information available online.  Other work by the same production team has been less successful — Chrystal, a dreary but highly watchable drama (worth seeing if only for Lisa Blount’s singing) and the recent and decidedly less ambitious Randy and the Mob – but a new film, That Evening Sun, based on a William Gay short story, seems promising.

The Accountant is a comedy.  It’s also exceptionally tragic.  The characters (there are only 3 in the entire film) are forced to watch their culture crumble around them and are powerless to respond, save the palpable but impotent rage that permeates the entire film.  It’s as maddening as it is hilarious.