Andrew
“RICH HILL” My rating: A- (Opening Aug. 8 at the Screenland Crown Center)
91 minutes | No MPAA rating
Get out your hanky. After watching “Rich Hill” you’ll need it.
This Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary from cousins Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo — centering on three adolescent boys coming of age in Rich Hill, MO (southeast of Kanas City in Bates County) — is a heartfelt and sobering study of poverty in America.
It’s about the sort of people the rest of the world looks upon with amusement and disdain, something that is acknowledged in the opening minute by 14-year-old Andrew, who declares “We’re not trash. We’re good people.”
And Andrew really is good people, a young man overflowing with hope and benign intentions despite a family situation — a mother this close to being institutionalized and a handyman father whose endless (and apparently hopeless) quest for employment means moving his clan several times every year — that would leave a lesser individual angry and impotent.
Instead Andrew is smart, well-spoken, and maintains a charitable disposition that is little short of miraculous. You feel that he might have a real chance at making something of himself.
The same cannot be said of the film’s other two subjects.
Appachey
Appachey, 13, is a tubby mess. His mother rattles off a list of conditions — ADHD, bi-polar disorder, maybe Asperger’s — with which her son has been diagnosed.
Appachey finds it hard to concentrate, smokes like someone twice his age, and has anger issues that will eventually see him committed to a juvenile facility. He commits destructive acts without so much as a thought. His one real pleasure is skateboarding.
Harley, 15, has anger issues, too. He lives with his grandma, since his mom is in prison. He still talks to her every week by phone. We learn later on that her crime was a reaction to a terrible thing that happened to Harley…a thing so awful that it may have crippled him emotionally.
He has an unhealthy interest in knives. Big ones. And an obsession with what sort of punishment should be meted out to men who rape children.
Tragos and Palermo obviously spent countless hours with their subjects, who regard the filmmakers as part of the landscape. There doesn’t seem to be any self-censorship just because there’s a camera in the room.
Harley
At times the boys and their families talk directly to the filmmakers, whom they clearly regard as a friendly sounding board.
This makes for an astonishingly intimate experience.
Through Palermo’s disarmingly beautiful cinematography, “Rich Hill” captures the physical side of impoverished lives: The window pane-rattling freight trains, the rooms knee deep in discarded clothing, the jury-rigged wood-burning stove Andrew’s family uses when the gas is turned off, the diet of fast food.
But it’s the emotional and spiritual toll of poverty that leaves us aching. We come to see poverty as generational. Appachey’s mother recalls leaving her mother’s house at 17 and becoming a mother herself only a few months later: “I had no time for hope or dreams.”
The cycle seems destined to be repeated indefinately. The overall effect of all this is quietly devastating.
Andrew, the most positive individual on display here, wonders when good fortune will finally shine on his family.
“God must be busy with everyone else,” he says hopefully, holding to his belief that one day things will turn around.
“It’ll break my heart if it doesn’t.”
Consider our hearts already broken.
| Robert W. Butler
Another interesting movie , what do you think? R
I saw this film at True/false film festival in Columbia in March. I particularly wanted to see it, as I grew up in the 1950-60’s about 30 miles east of Rich Hill on a farm. We also were very poor, and I felt for the families. If someone had come in and filmed our household, the world would have been appalled. The one thing I was touched by in the film was the common thread of love for each other in each family. At the end of the screening the film makers surprised us all by bringing out all the families. There has been progress for each of them and that was heartening. I loved the film and will see it, hopefully with my sisters, this week.