The customary patterns in contemporary independent
filmmaking involve a constellation of familiar elements, forming an inspiring
saga that regularly enlivens the goosed-up press releases that pass for
entertainment journalism. The stories follow a familiar model of aspiration and
struggle, detailing the adventures of impoverished film school graduates with
grand dreams. They beg loans from affluent parents and generous friends,
mortgage their possessions and max out their credit cards to purchase film
stock, rent equipment, hire unknown actors (along with the ubiquitous Steve
Buscemi) and technicians, and eventually triumph over the immense difficulties
of low-budget production and post-production. After the completion of their
work, the exhausted filmmakers trek to the usual festivals to impress potential
distributors, and, if they are lucky, they subsequently find friendly venues in
the art houses, attract positive reviews, large audiences, and financial
support for their next venture into cinema.
           As the new
picture Levity (likely to hit
Rochester screens early this summer) demonstrates, the facts sometimes deviate
drastically from the legend. Despite its grimly low-budget look, its offbeat
story, and its totally non-Hollywood manner, the movie employs the talents of a
number of highly successful members of the mainstream American film community
(actually a common practice in the indie racket). It stars such established
names as Billy Bob Thornton, Morgan Freeman, and Holly Hunter, along with the
younger, but well known, Kirsten Dunst. Although it represents the directorial
debut, as they say, of Ed Solomon, he’s an experienced Hollywood screenwriter,
with Men In Black, the Bill and Ted flicks, and a great many
other film and television credits chalked up on his fuselage.
           The movie
itself, however, conforms — in almost every detail of style and content —
to what audiences have come to expect from independent film. Its simple story
of the completely undramatic redemption of an entirely unheroic man, told
through some flat voiceover, deliberate dialogue, and a grimly literal visual
narrative, contrasts starkly with the usual Hollywood slickness, glamour, and
melodrama. Its open-ended, essentially downbeat conclusion expresses the
ambiguity and incompleteness of its characters’ lives, the drabness of its
world, and the faint possibility of hope.
           Thornton
plays Manual Jordan, a convict released from prison after serving 22 years for
shooting a young convenience store clerk in a botched robbery. Haunted by his
guilt, fixated on the life he ended, Manual returns to the neighborhood of the
crime, searching for some barely articulated sense of redemption. Through a
curious combination of chance and circumstance, he finds himself in a position
to make some sort of amends to the survivors of the youth he killed, and
perhaps achieve some peace of mind for himself.
           Although
the murky naturalism of the atmosphere, the steadfast flatness of the
performances, and Manual’s affectless manner mesh precisely with his rejection
of any faith in God, a subdued sense of the supernatural pervades the movie.
When he answers a ringing pay telephone in an empty parking lot, as if fated,
he finds himself accepting a job from the man at the other end of the line,
Miles Evans (Freeman), a preacher who runs a soup kitchen and mission. That job
leads to Manual’s encounter with two women: Sofia (Dunst), who systematically
sickens herself with drink and drugs at the club across the street from the
mission; and Adele Easley (Hunter), the sister of the teenager Manual killed so
many years ago.
           The small
movie’s slight plot establishes a kind of chain of good works, as the stolid,
passive Manual, following the offhand, cryptic directions of Evans, tries to
save Sofia from herself and instruct a bunch of troubled teenagers in the
lessons he learned from imprisonment. He also wants to find some way to confess
to Adele and receive at least a measure of forgiveness. In an odd, almost
inexplicable way, he simultaneously both fails and succeeds at those endeavors,
but also creates some slight degree of difference in the lives of those he
touches.
           Like Robert
De Niro in the early stages of his career, Billy Bob Thornton manages the
difficult task of projecting an entirely different personality into almost
every role he undertakes. His passivity, his consistent flatness of tone and
absence of surface emotion, his deliberate diction, and his slow reaction to
the speech of others match the extraordinary consistency of his performance in
his breakthrough movie, Sling Blade.
In Levity, he wanders, a lonely man
in empty streets, a passive, troubled dweller in squalid rooms, searching
vaguely for some elusive answer to an unasked question, listening for some
unspoken word, trying to discover what he and the movie would never actually
name — something that might be called “salvation.”
Levity, starring
Billy Bob Thornton, Morgan Freeman, Holly Hunter, Kirsten Dunst, Geoffrey
Wigdor, Luke Robertson, Manuel Aranguiz, Dorian Harewood, Catherine Colvey;
written and directed by Ed Solomon. Local release TBA.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2003.
