Hale County This Morning, This Evening

Undeniably well made, this documentary focuses on the residents of this small town and shows their lives. However, i did eventually lose interest in it as there really isnt much forward momentum in the storytelling.

This is a curious movie with practically no acting performers but showing with realist scenes, images and talks the real life of a black community in Alabama Hale County. It's vivid and lively and we can see how that people lives and talks and fights and suffers drama or enjoy something like playing basketball for instance. It is a pleasant movie to watch since it disposes us well with these people's lives like if we were living with them indeed. It's seldom that we see a movie of this kind looking like a documentary with no plot or special action. It disposes us well and it is very well directed and edited.

If you follow your neighbors around for 24 hours you will discover that they are mostly very boring people. That's what we have here. This barely qualifies as a documentary. Unless you like seeing a toddler running around in circles for four minutes, you're not likely to enjoy this. A waste of time for everyone involved.

With documentaries, we are used to being explicitly told the narrative. We are used to linear storytelling. We are used to talking heads, some witty banter with the filmmakers, an occasional irreverent interviewee, and some title cards at the end to explain what happens to everyone after the project has finished. With "Hale County This Morning, This Evening," not only are these items nonexistent; there's barely any context for the film we're left with.

The only context we're given is delivered quickly, right up top, explaining that RaMell Ross, the director, began the project in 2009 as he was tracking the local basketball team. There's a considerable focus on these teens in the final cut of the film, but there's much, much more, too.

There's Daniel, the basketball star who dreams of getting his family out of poverty through attending Selma University. There's Boosie, caring for her child with two more on the way. There's Quincy, Boosie's husband, whom we first meet crying as he has his nose pierced. And there's, of course, Quincy and Boosie's kid, a hyperactive youngster who adores the camera.

Through each of these characters and a handful of peripheral personalities, "Hale County" constructs a dreamcatcher of moments -- I hesitate to call them stories, given how loosely the film treats them, so "moments" is more appropriate. But in those moments, the African-American, low-income world of Hale County breathes deeply, forcefully. A police officer stops a car, and a deer steps out, trepidatiously, onto the road to get a better view. Its breath comes out in billows of condensation. At another point in the film, a young man stands with his father as a thunderstorm crackles over the horizon. The wind tugs at their clothes and threatens to pull them away.

Beyond these standout moments, aided by Ross' divine cinematography and precise editing, the majority of the film is told through the perspective of children. The best shot in the film sees a plane gushing a smoke trail as it falter in mid-air and falls, dramatically, plumes running behind it. As it falls, in one continuous shot, we find ourselves staring at Quincy and Boosie's child, crying, so close to the camera that you can see the tears sparkle.

For narrative lovers, "Hale County" will understandably disappoint. It fires on the levels that "Samsara" and "Baraka" do -- this is a tonal piece more than a narrative one. To this end, however, the sound recording leaves a lot to be desired. Some of the flourishes work, like leaving in a rough, barely audible background conversation between the filmmaker and a chatty subject. But most of the film features poor recording, and much of it with unmic-ed subjects. At a certain point, I stopped trying to understand what people were saying and just watched for the visuals and the music.

If you go with the film and let it take you on its winding, existential journey, "Hale County" travels the breadth of the human experience, from a blissful two-plus-minute shot of an infant running to and fro across the room like an excited puppy to a solemn view of smoke from a burning tire, cascading over trees as it reaches toward the sky.

Some parts of "Hale County" hit me harder than "Won't You Be My Neighbor," another, more widely seen doc from this year. In those scenes and in the more quiet, reflective moments, the movie calls to mind that trope about the "long night of the soul." "Hale County" isn't THAT dramatic, but its humanism and its experimental storytelling capture, hauntingly and beautifully, the morning and evening of the soul.

It would be fair to describe Alabama based filmmaker/teacher RaMell Ross's Oscar nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening as an dreamlike experience.

Feeling absolutely cut from the same cloth as some of Terrence Malick's most memorable and eye capturing tapestry's, Hale County chooses to ignore any type of typical narrative or documentary structure as Ross follows a collection of real life characters across a long standing period of time, as Ross shines a light on modern day lives of black American's in the famous American state.

No doubt inspired by Malick's visionary filmmaking techniques and golden age filmmakers James Agee and Walker Evans, who shot footage of the area in the 1930's to document the depression and poverty that existed in the community, Ross embedded himself with the local Hale County residents and decides too not ask the hard questions of the people he meets or the issues he shines a light on but instead allows his imagery and camera to do the talking.

If there is a slight narrative driver of the film it's in the documentation of school students Quincy Bryant and Daniel Collins, but these two figures are really just passengers in Ross's journey as their lives change and evolve before our very eyes but with very little thorough or deep analysis this style has a detrimental emotional effect on viewers as we are never allowed to dive into their minds or lives completely as Ross keeps us at arm's length throughout.

It's an unfortunate aspect of the film, as Hale County feels entirely like an art-house experiment, not so much an informative or constructive experience, even if the fly on the wall like aspect of proceedings allows us to catch raw and intimate glimpses into the people and the land that make Hale County the place it is today.

There are beautiful moments scattered across Hale County's run-time such as a an early morning sunrise across a dew covered paddock or a star strewn nightscape shot through the quiet surrounds of a local basketball court but all the fine moments captured forever by Ross can't compensate for the lack of a hook to keep us emotionally present in the film, for as it stands we are but willing passengers up for a unique look at a time and place filled with love, loss and future hope.

Final Say -

Some stunning shots and intimately captured moments help make Hale County This Morning, This Evening an eminently watchable documentary but its dearth of a real story or characters we can get to know make it a pleasing but forgettable experience.

3 furniture removalists out of 5

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