PUTTY HILL TRAILER (FINAL UP-REZ) from Matt Porterfield on Vimeo.
Putty Hill is what rose from the ashes when the funding for Matthew Porterfield's second feature, Metal Gods, fell through. It's an ungainly phoenix, if not a cinematic chimera outright, a sooty verité-fiction hybrid that follows a clutch of people gathering for a funeral in Baltimore.
The film rolled into Boston trailing behind it a well-received screening at the Berlinale, New Yorker film scribe Richard Brody's perfervid boosterism of all things Porterfield, SXSW love, and a unanimous vote from the lovely lads on the narrative feature jury in Atlanta. Even more persuasive, Baltimore native Gabe Wardell, the head of ATL FF, gave it his highest commendation. [Disclaimer: One of its producers has become a friend after several hectic Flaherty Seminars.] So there was some serious anticipation on my part.
Which almost disappeared completely as I mounted the stairs to the Somerville's wee theatre 4 and spotted the snow-white locks of one Ray Carney. Aw, crap. Somewhat improbably, in 2007 I'd ended up getting drinks with Carney, Aaron Katz, various Safdies, still more boys, and my pal Daniel after the American Independents screening at HFA of Katz's lovely Quiet City and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs. I'd bristled then about being called to account for my entire gender regarding the character of Hannah, and not even meeting the lovely Greta Gerwig in person later, at the last-ever Film Prom [NYFF 2009], assuaged that. Irish Catholics hold grudges, as Carney [or his career path, anyway] would likely attest.
Then I got over myself. Carney may have a tendency to set himself up as a kingmaker when it comes to young, mostly male filmmakers of a certain stripe, but I generally like the movies that carry his imprimatur. And, man, did I like Putty Hill.
Cullen Gallagher has a thorough, thoughtful review of the film at Hammer to Nail. Trying to improve on it would be a fool's errand, or at the very least would involve many more viewings to even come close. So, instead, I want to talk about two moments of aural astonishment.
Gallagher notes:
Long takes and environment-specific audio dominate, which combine to give real weight to the time and place of the scenes—a natural rhythm whose deceptive simplicity belies the rigor and artistry behind it. A mother’s voice cutting through the booming sound of heavy metal emitting from behind a teen’s door; echoes of an ice cream truck and a helicopter mixing as a group of young girls walk through a forest, smoking and talking amongst themselves, their voices little more than an evocative element of a richly mixed soundtrack. In a later scene, these same girls sit on a couch, watching television and chatting. As two of them get up and cross the room, the camera follows. The soundtrack, however, stays with the girls on the couch talking about the upcoming funeral, resulting in a complex audio/visual counterpoint that goes completely against every textbook definition of “editing.” It’s an absolutely liberating moment for both the filmmaker and the audience, and shows the sort of delicate revolutions going on just beneath the surface in Porterfield’s films.
The direct sound recording is so beautifully designed and so immediate that the moments at which the film chooses to abandon its fidelity to sound perspective are arresting and discomfiting. Somehow, the documentary-style queries the offscreen director poses to the various characters seem more natural than the decision to follow two young men away from a skate park in a long shot while keeping their conversation lavalier-close to us. A technique so conventional as to go unnoticed in other films here sticks out. Yet the reasons for foregrounding this particular conversation are as mysterious and unexplained as everything else in this film.
More than anything, Putty Hill captures the noise of life. Even -- especially -- life in the shadow of the tragic, too soon but also inevitable overdose death of the never-seen Cory that draws these characters together. After the funeral, the mourners end up singing karaoke in a dingy, wood-paneled hall, borrowing the emotion from pop songs to express their otherwise inarticulate sorrow. We may think we've seen this before, but Porterfield's long takes let our embarrassment at watching these nonprofessional actors sing songs as cliched as "Wild Horses" and "I Will Always Love You" build, breathe, and then subside. What remains, miraculously, is moving and true. It's a shame that the trite rightness and ubiquity of these played-to-death songs goes hand-in-hand with the prohibitive licensing fees that will probably prevent them from being heard if Putty Hill ever gets distribution.
UPDATE: The Cinema Guild will distribute Putty Hill. Look for it this fall.
