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There’s a scene in Ron Howard’s new “Hillbilly Elegy” that comes close to the quiet dignity that I wish the rest of the movie had. Glenn Close stands on a doorstep. She plays Mamaw, the proud Appalachian grandmother of the high school student who would eventually write the memoir the film is based on. Mamaw accepts a free dinner from Meals on Wheels. And even though it hurts her, she asks for more food. The delivery man blinks, embarrassed. But he bends the rules a bit and the two tune in on a small but meaningful act of charity.
It has always been difficult to portray the complex realities of poverty – not just its widened emptiness but the emotions of shame and hopelessness that flow from it. This is doubly true for those who are employed by Hollywood.
Filmmakers from Europe and Asia have a stronger track record. Italy has its earthly tradition of neorealism, bringing us mid-century heartbreakers like “Bicycle Thieves” and “Umberto D.” In India, Satyajit Ray made the human miniatures of his 1950s Apu trilogy, a hair’s breadth away from misery. Socially engaged voices like the British Ken Loach (“me, Daniel Blake”) and the Belgian Dardenne brothers (“Rosetta”) have each won Cannes first prize, the Palme d’Or, twice.
But with millions of Americans closer to poverty than a year ago and food lines snaking on the horizon, perhaps we need to improve to address it. Even if the theatrical cast bounces back like magic in a post-vaccine world, the money will stay on the minds of audiences no matter how much breakout and popcorn we’d like to eat.
To its enduring credit, Hollywood produced a mythical moment of compassion during the worst days of the Great Depression: a climactic close-up that, even decades later, remains nuanced and open. Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” (1931) is a vibrant comedy of economic concern. While the ingenuity of its iconic hero is never seriously in doubt, the little tramp looks pretty rude by the end of the film – penniless, out on the streets, in ragged clothes after a period in prison. In the final shot, however, he is seen for who he is by the one he loves; her eyes shine, knowing that there can be no more hiding her true identity. Does she love him back? (By extension, isn’t it?) The fade to black on Chaplin’s shaking face is both hopeful and a little uncertain.
Critic James Agee called it “the highest moment in cinema”. But studios, by and large, have not followed Chaplin’s lead. In the end, it took the schism of independent filmmaking decades later to open the door to flawless examinations of poverty that weren’t just sentimental, reductive, or convenient plots to be solved in no time. time. Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” (2008) plunges us into the brutal dilemmas that come with limited means: do I buy dog food or steal it? Should I have my broken down car repaired or do without? Each choice pushes Wendy, an Alaskan-related loner played by Michelle Williams a bit away, as do the rare instances where she meets sympathy, an emotion that seems to trouble her. (Times critic AO Scott celebrated the film as a piece of local “neo-neorealism.”)
Like “Wendy and Lucy,” honest livelihood films never prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution. Sometimes it’s not about fixing things. In the midst of the misery of Sean Baker’s pastel-hued “The Florida Project” (2017) and Harmony Korine’s “Gummo” (1997), children embark on dreaming and play, inventing their own escapes, not so innocently. . Jennifer Lawrence is too young to raise siblings and reunite with her missing father, but that’s exactly what she does in Debra Granik’s Ozarks thriller “Winter’s Bone” (2010).
In the upcoming “Nomadland” (a critical sensation at fall film festivals), Frances McDormand disappears as Fern, a hardened widow living in her van and traveling from job to job after her town collapsed. Nevada plant. (She’s “homeless, not homeless,” the character insists.) The film takes care to preserve Fern’s cryptic trail of independence, which is sometimes seen by others as icy. McDormand and director Chloé Zhao improvised and shot their project with real nomads in a van.
Finding a tension of self-reliance or daring is crucial in raising a poverty film – even on a modest budget – to sound patronizing. Michelle Pfeiffer performed her career performance in “Where Is Kyra?” (2018), Andrew Dosunmu’s independent masterpiece of urban isolation. It is an unemployed and divorced Brooklyn woman who falls through the cracks of the social safety net. (Kyra is on the verge of becoming a sackwoman.) Her desperation is counterbalanced by a willingness to exert frightening efforts.
This is because poverty itself is scary. Financial ruin is the subtext of so many classic American horror movies, perhaps because monsters are easier to deal with than real ones. Leatherface and his cannibalistic clan from “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974) wouldn’t have an ax to grind if they hadn’t been fired at the Meat Wrapping Plant. The hooked-handed stalker of “Candyman” (1992) takes on the oppressed Chicagoans of the Cabrini-Green housing project, at least before he begins to indulge a taste for graduate students obsessed with urban legends.
A sci-fi film that does more than lip service to the plight of the poor is John Carpenter’s sociopolitically fiery “They Live” (1988), categorically described by the director as a reaction to Reaganomics. His homeless hero, Nada (Roddy Piper), drifts between construction work before donning a pair of special sunglasses that allow him to see the alien invasion (i.e. yuppie) already at at hand. According to Piper, who experienced homelessness himself before his wrestling career took off, Carpenter offered a daily salary to vagrants appearing as extras. He fed them too.
Partly filmed in a fragile slum the script calls Justiceville, with the luxury glass towers of downtown Los Angeles shining in the distance, “They Live” is subversive on many fronts, most notably for bearing witness to views that some city leaders would prefer to erase the urban landscape. Such erasures had happened in the past: Kent MacKenzie’s “The Exiles” (1961) captures Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill and his small community of working-class Native Americans, who once lived on reservations. Today, the neighborhood’s Victorian buildings and their inhabitants are long gone, paved with corporate gentrification and racism.
Like a photograph, a film crystallizes pain, traps it in time. In the case of these dramas – with the most beautiful of them, “Killer of Sheep” (1978) by Charles Burnett – a universality attaches to scenes that anyone who struggles will recognize: tense conversations at the kitchen table, fury to a constant stream of disappointments, from car troubles to the sickening monotony of existence. (Burnett’s downcast patriarch works in a slaughterhouse.) The camera watches, a steady companion.
That same documentary eye also catches something haphazard in Watts’ hazy summer air: boys jumping from rooftops from building to building. It’s dangerous and crazy – and also euphoric. There is freedom in their leap. The camera tilts down and we don’t see any safety net. Burnett includes the photo for all of these reasons and one more: maybe you can fly away.
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