Flak Magazine: Review of George Washington, 2-2-01

Whether it's the naïveté of a poor boy with a birth defect who "said he was gonna be the President of the United States" or the long-passed glory days of rusted-out train stations, factories and mills long since abandoned by the Industrial Revolution's promises of progress and prosperity, George Washington traffics in innocence, simple and lost.

Existing more as a collection of chronologically ordered vignettes than a cohesive plot, George Washington languidly tears up cinema as few movies do anymore, and demands to be seen. Writer-director David Gordon Green's debut feature, which ran the festival circuit last year, is chiefly a story of five pre-teen residents of a post-Industrial, post-boom southern town.

The group of kids — four black, one white — hangs out in an abandoned construction site, a vacant public restroom, a junkyard and other brilliantly photographed, desolate urban settings. As the movie opens, Nasia (Candace Evanofski), the film's narrator, thinks she's caught in a love triangle between her 12-year-old boyfriend Buddy (Curtis Cotton III) and the enigmatic George (Donald Holden), who wears a football helmet because his skull never quite finished forming.

In reality, the sensitive Buddy (he sings his mom the theme from Blazing Saddles to help her sleep at night) loves Nasia as much as a 12-year-old can and George has other things on his mind, though what isn't exactly clear. The group is rounded out by beefy older ringleader Vernon (Damien Jewan Lee, the strongest performance in a movie full of them) and the stringy-haired, tomboy blonde Sonya (Rachael Handy).

The quintet's exploits and the growing love triangle between Nasia, Buddy and George is interspersed with scenes of the kids interacting with their families and a group of railroad workers whose members seem about as adult as Green's pre-teens.

A third of the way into the movie, one of the kids dies in a freak accident. Not knowing what to do and fearing incarceration in a sort of semi-comic, naïve-kid way, the three witnesses (Nasia is not present) hide the body. The rest of the movie follows the kids trying to carry out their lives and act normal despite Nasia's ignorance of the death and an ongoing search for the missing character. Naturally, different ways of dealing with the death drive the kids apart and serve as jumping-off points for Green's remaining vignettes.

In between the aimless, idle play and fear of legal and societal retribution, Green's characters deliver poignant soliloquies on abstract concepts like love, self-worth and the state of the world.

"This place is falling apart faster than we can do anything about it," says one of the young-adult railroad workers, who might be talking about the film's small-town setting or pointing an accusing finger at entire generations of Americans past.

Given the children's relative innocence — they seem wonderfully oblivious to the concept of race and not one swear word is uttered in the entire movie — it's reasonable to expect a certain Charlie Brown everymanism, a concept George's bald head and quiet demeanor do little to dispel.

Adding to that feeling, the film's incredibly slow pace — do not go see this movie if you're prone to restlessness — is not unlike the drawn-out plots of a three-panel strip. Not much happens onscreen, but there's a strange, magical surrealism lurking underneath Green's film, which differs from Schulz's work mostly in its lack of pre-war, pathetic-little-Christmas-tree-style sentimentality.

Though fragments of Green's script include musings on friendship and love — "I hope you live forever," Nasia tells George at the end of one of the film's most striking pieces of dialogue — his characters' words and delivery styles are so one-of-a-kind, so planted in a non-existent world between omniscience and naïveté, It's like nothing you've ever seen.

The same can be said of the obvious compatibility between the film's white, film-school director and crew and its black, non-professional cast, which Green discovered in beauty parlors, basketball courts and on the street. During production, cast and crew lived together in a single house where Green showed his actors movies like Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven and Errol Morris' documentary The Thin Blue Line.

There were chore lists, family squabbles and romance between two cast members (Evanofski and Cotton). At their request, the dissolution of their teen love led to the movie's ad-libbed opening breakup scene between their characters. While Nasia dumps Buddy, Evanofski is telling off Cotton. It's powerful stuff.

Which is probably the best way to sum up George Washington, a strange, wonderful, one-of-a-kind movie that firmly plants Green at the head of the directors' Class of 2000. Watch him soar.

A slightly different version of this review previously appeared in the Oakland Tribune.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)