Not So Poor

Craig Brewer's fine film is back (briefly) by popular demand.

by Chris Davis

Local filmmaker Craig Brewer has written and directed a mighty special movie. Those given to hyperbole might even call it a miracle. His moody, low-to-no budget feature, The Poor & Hungry (filmed in its entirety by a crew of two), just shouldn't work at all -- there are so many places where it could, and in fact does, go wrong.

A redneck car thief falls in love with a Midtown cello player because her music touches him in a way he can't comprehend? Come on. How cornball is that? Did I mention that the cello player's father is in a coma, or that the car thief's junkie (presumably lesbian) sidekick proves her love for him time and again though her little streetwise heart is breaking all to pieces? Gimmie a break. No, this film, shot in black-and-white video, then "film-looked" (a computer trick designed to make video look more like film), should fall flat on its indie ass. But it doesn't. In fact, it's all the more potent because of, rather than in spite of, its flirtation with pretension and cliché. Imagine, if you will, a group of musicians jamming out until all semblance of melody has disappeared into a muddle of random notes and drumbeats. Imagine the song they're playing is on the verge of disintegrating into nothing but noise. Out of nowhere, and with no visible signal, the players put together a whale of a hook that takes the listener by surprise. Such is the strength of Brewer's film.

The Poor & Hungry begins with a calm voiceover deliberately and deliciously at odds with the tense and wisely unrushed car-thieving action on screen. "Sometimes the parts are worth more than the whole thing," a disembodied voice drawls. The reference is to the "parting-out" of a stolen car, but Brewer's micro-poem also functions much in the same capacity as a hoodlum's crowbar, jimmying the blacked-out window of consciousness wide open, allowing the viewer to catch a brief, albeit edifying, glimpse of that elusive animal called "the human condition." Since Shakespeare's Macbeth first railed against the idiot's tale "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," writers have dulled countless quills and spilled buckets of inky angst considering the dizzying fear that, in the end, cruel death shrouds us all in meaninglessness. Shakespeare got it down in one sentence. Brewer has done likewise.

By the same token, "Sometimes the parts are worth more than the whole thing" is an ideal one-sentence essay for the film it introduces -- a film that is at least half an hour too long and a tad too repetitive. Here lies The Poor & Hungry's principal weakness, a weakness that almost undermines an otherwise lovely (yes, lovely) effort. This is not to say that there is a particularly bad scene or one that is extraneous to the action or tone of the film, but the conventional wisdom holds -- there can be too much of a good thing. Sometimes, in order to make a better movie, even a great scene or a beautiful shot must eventually find its way to the cutting-room floor.

The performances Brewer has coaxed from his actors are, in most cases, nothing short of extraordinary. Eric Tate is perfectly lackluster (in this case a compliment) as Eli, a downtrodden car thief, emasculated by fear and powerlessness. The tawdriness of his day-job (handyman at a topless club) has tied the already-confusing issues of love and sex into a Gordian knot of self-loathing and not-so-quiet desperation, making Eli's pursuit of the virginal cellist (played to fragile perfection by Lake Latimer) seem inevitable. She and her music represent a world where purity is possible and people can be good -- a world the humble car thief has somehow been exiled from.

As an urban cowboy-cum-super-pimp, T.C. (Topcat) Sharpe fills the screen with equal parts menace and comic relief. The prayer he offers over the acquisition of his newly acquired Cadillac convertible is both genuinely disturbing and a real gut-buster. Above all, special praise is due to Lindsey Roberts. In the role of Harper, a junkie street hustler whose tough-chick facade masks the film's purest motives, Roberts is breathtaking. In her final moments on screen, hope pulls away in a checkered cab and Roberts gives heartbreaking chase. In these moments she achieves a level of honest desperation that hasn't been seen since Sal Mineo called out, "I've got the bullets!" in Rebel Without a Cause.

The Poor & Hungry is resplendent with beautiful photography. Brewer, who functioned as both director and cameraman, has a superb eye for detail. Though several films have been shot in Memphis over the past couple of decades, not since Mystery Train has there been a film that actually captures the texture and rhythms of our city on the bluff. With a soundtrack featuring music by local noisemakers Skinny Pimp, the Riverbluff Clan, and the Delta Queens, it sounds absolutely right.

The Poor & Hungry
7 and 10 p.m., Thursday, June 1st
Studio on the Square