Hale County This Morning This Evening

2018 Best Documentary nominee

Rating: 16/20

Plot: It doesn't really have one although there's a kid who wants to play basketball and a couple who have children in there.

Like a more experimental Frederick Wiseman with a little more patience, first-time filmmaker RaMell Ross spent five years in the titular county filming its inhabitants and seeing what stories unfold. The results is a very short but mesmerizingly intimate look at real people with real struggles. It's lovely and poetic, often hopeful and often sad. Ross finds everyday magic in insignificant moments, focusing on a lot of the spaces between the bigger moments in these human beings' lives. Using slow-motion and time-lapse stuff and having sounds bleed from scenes into subsequent scenes, Ross brings just the right amount of flash to this, never forgetting that his movie is about people. Odd title screens bring up questions:

What is the orbit of our dreaming?
How do we frame someone?
What happens when all the cotton is picked?
Whose child is this?
Where does time reside?

It's probably unnecessary and doesn't give the imagery as much context as it might seem. Instead, the viewer is forced to put together the pieces and find connections between the seemingly incongruous and often abstract images and scenes. References to a catfish plant and lots and lots of sports allusions help a little, as do at least a dozen shots that have to do with celestial bodies--the sun in various stages of setting or rising, stars, clouds, the moon, even an eclipse, the latter discussed in accidentally profound ways as something people in their state can't see according to people in the know. I have to say--I was touched by the whole thing, even the parts I didn't understand.

My favorite bits:

--Looking up through a basketball hoop at time-lapsed stars and cloud wisps
--The moon magically showing up in a bathing child's hand
--Smoke from a burning tire rolling in front of trees and sunlight
--A guy standing on a horse and asking if he was "gonna be a star," yet another reference to skies and dreams
--A bee walking in circles in the empty bed of a truck
--Blurred television bubbles
--A hunched windsock man (a "balloon goon," if you ask my friend Fred) with fireworks in the background
--A deer in the headlights, hazard blinkers accompanying
--A cop's flashlight aimed at the audience (similar to Blindspotting)
--Crying while a plane spirals seemingly out of control

I wanted to penalize this a point because the words "careth not" appeared on the screen at one point, but then I remembered a scene where people are amusing themselves with the shadow of a Chick-fil-A fry and gave the point right back. More product placement--a Digiorno's ad playing while there's a shot of a line of drool running down a baby's stomach.