Movie Review: "Below Dreams"

Joel Potrykus' Buzzard might be the best commentary on and representation of the post #OWS generation of slackers / slacktivists. The lead character Marty scavenges and scrounges around his domain and that of others, scamming and stealing anything and everything with a misguided and misinterpreted sense of entitlement. You COULD pull some kind of conservative Republican message from the film - just blame the rich for all of your problems, why don'tcha - IF it all weren't a self criticism with a humorous and protective bent. We're self absorbed and going nowhere but DAMMIT we are who we are! Then again, that could also be taken as a depressing and dangerous self assessment of our own worth...

... not that "our" covers ALL of "us"...

Garrett Bradley's Below Dreams observes and reports on the earnest and tried and true youth, with the unfortunate misfortune to be adults in the current economic climate. Our trio of leads - a single mother, an unemployed ex convict and a drifter type - travel to and from New Orleans, looking for opportunities to improve and progress. We watch the depressed and oppressed trudge along at a slog, despite their best efforts, while their problems need immediate attention. This is the generation without degrees but with debt. Without marriage but with children. Without stability but with hope. Of course, you can't pay bills with hope...

... not that it's an intangible worth getting rid of...

Where Buzzard is satirical and sarcastic, Below Dreams is sad and serendipitous. "You can't live on ideas alone" is one piece of advice given in the movie. "Look at your hands, and figure out what to do with them" is another. Marty in Buzzard has his life pretty much figured out - and if he didn't, he really wouldn't care. Advice is not something he seeks. The people in Below Dreams, however, don't have the luxury of self discovery, or any luxury to speak of. Advice is not something they can apply at the moment. Past circumstances and environments that forced them to play the cards dealt have left them without much personal freedom, or rather the ability to execute their freedoms. Stuck in a Chinese finger trap of a rut, they do the best they can day by day, paycheck to paycheck. Well, jobs are hard to come by.

We see lives move to and from New York and New Orleans, two vastly different cities of opportunity. The camera captures everything with a harmless and curious voyeurism, as well as an eye for unintentional depth of the moment. When a mother is walking away from a bus, down a street, she comes to a cab from the Affordable Yellow company. She asks to be directed to a place to eat nearby. At one point, she walks under a Department of Labor sign, while a job hunting man passes by the Joy Theater. There is almost always a police siren wailing in the background. When that isn't heard, it's Eraserhead industrial noise. The NY and NOLA of Below Dreams are presented as places of wondrous irony and unnerving disturbance. The cameraman sees and hears both sides, but do the people being photographed?

It's a movie of beaten down optimism. It's also a movie where the attitudes of the characters slowly rub off on the voyeurs (us and the crew). We get long, single shot takes of people talking and droning, sometimes done from far away, that lack a forward energy at first glance. A second time around, there is an empathy that appears, one that progresses as the story does. In the beginning, the eye is a bit critical. By the end, it has related to everyone seen. Whatever repetitions that annoyed me initially are easily forgiven by this emotional growth within the craft.

I don't want to confirm or deny Below Dreams as being the yang to Buzzard's yin, but I would like to suggest both as some kind of cultural double feature. They sum up the high school classes of the early 2000s, now grown up, quite nicely. By nicely, I mean well. Don't confuse this with kind. We don't live in kind times, and certainly aren't people kindly taken to. But we could be.

5 / 5 *s

Below Dreams played previously at Indywood and the New Orleans Film Festival. It is now available on VOD through iTunes, Google Play and other services.

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