Butler's Cinema Scene

“TOPSIDE” My rating: B (In select theaters and on demand)

85 minutes | No MPAA rating

Most films today start strong and run out of gas.  

I blame the need to push a script past a phalanx of indifferent gatekeepers. Screenwriters cram all their good ideas in the first few pages so as not to lose the reader; alas, this desperate front loading makes for some pretty awful third acts.

The indie effort “Topside” takes the opposite tack.  It starts slow — too slow, for my taste — but ends on a haunting note.  It’s that rarity…a movie that gets better as it goes along.

Directed and written by Logan George and Celine Held, this festival favorite (it won major awards at SXSW and Venice) hovers somewhere between urban fairy tale and gritty docudrama.

Our main character — at least for the first half — is five-year-old Little (Zhaila Farmer). She lives in NYC, but not the Big Apple we’re familiar with.  Little is part of a community of outsiders residing in the labyrinthine tunnels that make up the subway system.  She may never have seen the full light of day.

The film’s first half hour establishes Little’s environment.  She’s not entirely deprived…there are electric lights here and there, an even a handheld video game player.  She runs and plays and daydreams like other kids, and lives in a hovel decorated with dangling folk art items.

But it’s a life fraught with danger.  Periodically maintenance crews will penetrate this netherworld, leveling subterranean homesteads and sending the residents scurrying for darker corners.

And then there’s Little’s mother Nikki (played by writer/director Held), a single mom with a drug problem.

Nobody in this film discusses why they have chosen a life underground. No doubt economic issues and personal psychosis play major roles.

The turning point of George and Held’s script finds Little and Nikki dispossessed and forced to the surface.  The light, wide open spaces and bustling street life are disorienting — terrifying, even — for Little. Nikki knows her way around this “topside,” and desperately works to keep Little warm and fed while steering clear of the authorities.

They briefly take refuge in a church-run shelter, but cannot avoid drawing attention.  It’s unsafe to stay in one place too long.

“Topside’s” third act shifts almost entirely to Nikki, and it is here that it hits a humanistic high note.  Nikki strives to be a good mother despite her addiction. Nothing matters more to her than her child, and when the two are separated she launches a desperate search that end with a throat-grabbing act of sacrifice.

Before “Topside” George and Held made documentaries about homelessness; their earlier efforts undoubtedly inspire and inform this fictional feature.

But their training in non-fiction cinema is obvious; despite the semi-fantastic setting “Topside” unfolds with an almost documentary honesty and lack of pretension. The visual details, cinematography and unforced performances exude a deeper reality

|Robert W. Butler