Honeydripper

Saw the movie, Honeydripper, with Danny Glover at the Palm Springs Film Festival today and it was wonderful Music was delightful and great characters, great photography, and I predict a big hit in 2008. It has been an audience favorite and probably be in the Best of Fest next Monday. Glover is outstanding; may be a little long, but every person in the film is well characterized. As a movie reviewer, I have given it FIVE STARS. I would like to know when it goes into general release so I can tell people all over the country. The blues music, rock n roll blends together. I recommend it highly. If this film came out in 2007 it would easily be in my top ten films of the year.

John Sayles, never one to avoid a political focus in movies, now brings us "Honeydripper". The movie is set in 1950 Alabama. The Jim Crow laws are still in effect, and black-white relations are limited to African-Americans performing only the most menial jobs: a number of people work in a cotton field for practically nothing (slavery has risen again!). Tyrone "Pinetop" Purvis (Danny Glover) owns a restaurant and often has singers come and play. Business hasn't been doing too well recently. Pinetop has worked hard his whole life and barely gotten by...but the possible arrival of a New Orleans singer might change things.

Aside from the great music, one can also see this movie as a look at the pivot era in the South. It's set during the Jim Crow era, around the start of the Korean War, just a few years away from the civil rights movement. One notices that even though this is still the age of institutionalized racism, many of the characters do what they can to try and have civil relationships with white people: Sheriff Pugh (Stacy Keach) is on pretty good terms with Pinetop, and Pinetop's wife Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton) manages to carry on a conversation with her employer (Mary Steenburgen). The music, of course, is really the best part. I certainly recommend this movie, as I have recommended every John Sayles movie that I've seen.

Also starring Yaya DaCosta, Charles S. Dutton, Vondie Curtis Hall, Keb' Mo', Kel Mitchell and Gary Clark Jr. I think that I saw John Sayles in a bit part.

I tuned into this one while trolling for a film and became immediately absorbed. The film interlocks several plots, as 'The Waltons' used to do -- the problem of keeping the night spot out of the hands of the criminal creditors, the issue of the unfulfilled wife (nicely mirrored by the alcoholic white woman for whom she is a servant), young love developing between the guitar player and lovely China Doll, a dispute between two cotton pickers (one a city slicker, the other a local field hand), the sheriff who, of course, is a racist but who loves un-spiced fried chicken, the inevitable tug of fundamentalist religion on the underclass of a rural town, and two waifs who end the film with a mime of the musicians they hope to be. I confess that I was stationed in southern Georgia a little after the time of this film and found my own experiences coming back vividly. It is a warm film, drawing on an ominous set of possibilities lurking behind the action, and it doesn't cheat with its interlocking happy endings. What a surprise!

So is this guy who gets off the train and carries a guitar in fact the famous man himself? Hardly. And Sonny is advised by the fantastic and friendly blind dobro player that he is on the wrong side of town.

Let me put it this way: There's good rockin' tonight! Yes, I said rock. Five years before white people discovered rock and roll, these people were doing it and doing it quite well.

There are outstanding performances from just about everyone. Danny Glover has some scenes that I wouldn't be surprised to see as Oscar clips. Charles Dutton does his usual fine work and makes us laugh. Stacy Keach also does great work. Mary Steenburgen has a good scene as the employer of one of the black women.

Keb Mo' gives what may the best performance of all, and not just as an actor. He can play that dobro!

The musicians are very talented, particularly Gary Clark.

Even those young boys give good performances, however brief. You have to watch them again at the end, after their pretend musical instruments have improved.

It's an outstanding effort you just have to see.

This is not a great movie by any stretch, but it is a very GOOD one. My rating should be 7.8. IMDb, invest in some higher technology! John Sayles proves yet again what can be done when there is unity of vision on a film, and when everyone involved passionately believes in what they are doing. Any limitations this film has must surely be due to the budget (was there one?) rather than any creative lapses on Sayles' part.

In fact, the only problems I have with "Honeydripper" are technical: some of the shots are out of focus, some of the scenes drag, and there is not a lot of dramatic tension to carry the piece along. It is enough, though, for those of us who can handle something more relaxed than the kinetics of Michael Bey or Steven ("I'll do anything for an Oscar!") Spielberg.

"Honeydripper" is really a small character study of a working class man, surrounded by good people, who is trying do do right by them and himself. It is a romance for the nostalgia of the Deep South in 1950, a period where Jim Crow was on the cusp of yielding to John Kennedy.

It is also a romance for music, where Gospel and Blues was about to fuse and metamorphise into Rock 'n Roll. Sayles loves everything he is doing; you can feel the writer/director's respect and integrity through the camera and the screen.

Unusual for a Sayles film, Danny Glover anchors the piece as its central character, the axis upon which the story and all the characters revolve. All the characters are complete human beings, with only a few drawn as caricatures. I don't mind.

This would be a good film to show as a double bill with "The Great Debators". Several themes overlap, but "Honeydrippers" is the more mature film. Here, a man's biggest grievance is not being able to live in dignity as a man who pays his way. Sayles' characteristic character arcs provide us with many dignified men and women who achieve that dignity by finding ways to honestly pay their way. They do it with joy, love and creativity.

Another fine Working Class film from Cinema's Working Class Hero.