★★A lot of the praise for this film is completely deserved. It really is beautiful, from the brown symmetry of rows of cotton plant stubs to the purple and grey color palate of the cheap artificial lighting. Even dark interiors managed to provide a line of highlight so we can make out the characters’ faces. And there’s a very strong sense of local color, too. Good American indy film is unexcelled when it comes to burrowing into a community the filmmaker knows well and showing us the truth of that community, and here we see the struggle of life in the Mississippi Delta, the loneliness and the few resources its people have. We’re taken to the crack house, the convenience store and the impoverished interiors people live in. Ballast is a deep look into a community we don’t often see. This film has a community truth that the larger indy, Winter’s Bone, tried to have, but while latter managed only to seem contrived, Ballast feels authentic.
However, the pervasive monotony of this film makes it a long, boring experience. For all the insight the film offers, Lance Hammer’s direction offers us too little cinema to engage us. Over the 96 minutes of the film, the vast majority of the scenes are short, 30-45 second snips. Such short takes can be good for variety in a film, but a feature film of them feels like a very long ping pong point. Perhaps as a function of this directorial choice, the dialog in each scene is limited, too — 2-4 lines most of the time. The repeatedly short takes and dialog snippets don’t sink the film right away because the cinematography and atmosphere are so interesting, but I was checking to see how much more of the movie I had left by the time I got to fifty minutes. Perhaps these directing choices were compelled by the use of nonprofessional actors who weren’t really up to the challenge. In particular, Micheal Smith, Sr. as Lawrence couldn’t engage the camera, so perhaps Hammer chose to keep the scenes short to minimize the dramatic burden.
For all its good points, Ballast isn’t a film I’ll want to sit through again. Its strong points included, the main insight I take away from this movie is the importance of the range of elements that moves good cinema.
