Honeydripper (2007)

The early 50s in the Deep South, Alabama. The Honeydripper Lounge, the juke joint of pianist Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) has seen better days – the music doesn’t excite, it probably doesn’t help that Tyrone doesn’t allow guitarists into his place, the audience doesn’t leave enough money, and most everybody appears to have lost patience with Tyrone’s attempts to save his place hustling. Not even to speak of his debts, particularly to a landlord who comes calling with a weekend ultimatum. Thus this weekend will be Tyrone’s last chance to save his place – for this he even breaks his “no guitarists” rule and has managed to invite famous New Orleans electric guitarist Guitar Sam. Obviously, things do not run as smoothly as Tyrone hopes.

Despite being set a couple of decades later, and being far less interested in plot or vampires, John Sayles’s Honeydripper would make an interesting double feature with Sinners, seeing as it centres around a dive bar in deep Alabama, music, and all aspects of the surrounding culture. Of course, this being a John Sayles film, it uses its plot as an incitement to begin exploring a community of people – what keeps them together, what keeps them apart, and in this particular case, how do you live when a racist system is always stacking the deck against you to lessen your triumphs and make all of your fuck-ups much worse. So the film spends just as much time on the disillusionment and potential religious conversion of Tyrone’s wife Delilah (LisaGay Hamilton), the dreams of his daughter China Doll (Yaya DaCosta) for a very modest idea of a better life, the hopes of young guitarist Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) for a life in music, and so on and so forth as it does on Tyrone’s increasingly desperate and immoral attempts to keep his head above water. There’s a plain matter-of-factness to the film’s portrayal of day-to-day racism, the way the local Sheriff (Stacy Keach) takes his corruption as his simple due as a white man lording it over black people that’s perhaps more painful than if it were showing the extremes and deepest horrors of these injustices (knowing Sayles, he probably wouldn’t think it his place to do so).

The film features a nearly all-black cast of Sayles veterans, character actors, musicians, and young actors on early gigs, and everyone appears deeply engaged with their craft here, even if they are just in the film for a scene or two. Glover does give one of his career best performances, projecting a complex mix of desperation and sadness, but also a genuine hopefulness that feels lived and earned. Nobody else here falls below that sort of level of performance.

Visually, Sayles sometimes strains against his budget, with some shots and camera set-ups that feel more as if they belonged into a contemporary cable TV movie, and an all-around cheapish look to the photography. Fortunately, Sayles’s script, the great performances and, yes, the quality of the music are more than enough to keep Honeydripper engaging and emotionally involving.

Three Films Make A Post: There's the first one. There's the right one. And there's the one you never forget.

Goodnight, My Love (1972): This TV movie set in the classic hardboiled private eye era of the 1940s in Los Angeles prefigures the kind of humour writer/director Peter Hyams – here at the beginning of his career as a feature director - would perfect a couple of years later in Busted and some of his following films. In the film at hand, it’s not quite there yet: the coarseness needed couldn’t really be injected into a TV movie, and the lighter parts of the humour never quite land. What’s left is an atypical role for Richard Boone (with Michael Dunn as his sidekick), a couple of moments where the genre homage actually sings, and quite a few shots that look better than the budget should have allowed.

Baby It’s You (1983): This romance is about as straightforwardly commercial as the film of John Sayles as a director ever got, which is not to say the bad kind of commercial at all. Rather, Sayles’s sensibilities allow him to take a very typical romance set-up and fill it with the kind of life that complicates things while still keeping to the core tenets of the genre (something Sayles always has been particularly good at). So this is a sometimes comedic romance that also talks about class divisions but never lets its interest in the politics of class get in the way. Instead Sayles uses his understanding of these things to strengthen and deepen the story and its characters, thereby getting a stronger emotional resonance. Add two pretty damn great performances by Rosanna Arquette and Vincent Spano, as well as some of the best use of later pop music in a period piece you’ll encounter in a movie life, and you simply have a great film, a romance that’s honest but never wants to be something horrible like an anti-romance.

Into the Picture Scroll: The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa (2005): I’m not sure if I should call this a formally atypical documentary or an experiment in narrative filmmaking. Director Sumiko Haneda (who has quickly become a favourite around these parts) retells the story told on one of the most important picture scrolls in Japanese art history with the help of voice work, traditional Japanese ballad storytelling, slow, closely-framed pans over the fantastic art of the scroll, nature shots to establish locations, and some narrative about the life of its creator and how the scroll might mirror some of it.

It’s a fascinating and immersive way to tell a story and the story of the story, turning this into a captivating deep dive into a piece of art and culture that’s also, very quietly and thoughtfully, formally daring. Which appears to have been one of Haneda’s particular talents.

The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)

Ireland in the 50s. Her father sends unhappy little Fiona (Jeni Courtney) to live with her grandparents in a small fishing village on the coast close-by to Roan Inish, a tiny island the family lived on in better times, before the death of Fiona’s mother, before “the Evacuation” (the film never explains the why and wherefore of that), and before the somewhat bizarre death of Fiona’s little brother Jamie on the day of said Evacuation.

Fiona is fascinated by the tales her family and others tell her of her family’s past on Roan Inish, of their supposed familial connection to selkies, and the death of her brother. Fiona herself encounters things that very much fit into a supernatural reading of the world, suggesting the idea that her little brother didn’t die, but was taken because the family left the island. During the course of the film, she will realize that the family’s return to Roan Inish might be all it needs to get her brother back, restoring a way of life clearly bound to make everyone happier to boot.

The great John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish does tell this story rather less dramatically than all of this may sound – this is a family-friendly picture and not folk horror, so the selkies’ activity, even when they do something pretty terrible like kidnap a baby, is treated more as a natural part of the world the characters live in than a source of horror. That’s not a criticism, mind you, for part of what makes Secret of Roan Inish as charming and as interesting as it is, is exactly how willing it is to take on the worldview of its child protagonist, looking at the world – and here, a selkie is just as much part of the natural world as is a fish - with wonder rather than terror. Fiona, we are told, is not a child to frighten easily, after all.

Typical for Sayles, quite a bit of the film’s running time is taken up by flashbacks to (or should that be called enactments of?) the various stories about her family and their past Fiona is told. In a Sayles film, identity, and understanding of the past and what we call home and community, is often constructed out of the bits and pieces of stories, people becoming what they are not just through experience but through the way others in their community share their own experiences with them. Of course, Sayles is too intelligent a writer to not understand the vagaries of reconstructing Truth out of Memory but he also realizes that there’s a difference between historical and personal truth, and the truths Fiona discovers are all personal even if they are based on tales of her family history.

Because the film is slow, and quiet, and consciously unspectacular – none of which is meant in any way as a criticism of the film, for this is indeed the way this particular story needs to be told – the director has time and space enough to let the places Fiona inhabits breathe, suggesting a slower tempo, a greater closeness to natural rhythms of life. This, as well as how the film frames the family’s return to their traditional way of life as something equivocally good, could easily turn into a bit of back to nature kitsch (the only kitsch in this one is part of the sometimes really kitsch-Irish score) but Sayles never frames the story that way. This is not a film preaching universal closeness to nature and the past (and selkies) but one about the closeness to nature and the past of this specific group of people, in this specific place and time (this being a Sayles film, specificity when it comes to social and economic structures and pressures is a given anyway, even though this isn’t a film that’s about these things). It’s a rather refreshing approach when looked at in 2019.


Not only the film’s writing is sharp and involving in a quiet unassuming way, though. The film’s visual side (with cinematography by Haskell Wexler) has a calm and unfussy sense of beauty, never going for a postcard view of the Irish coast but seeming to accept the beauty and magic quite matter of factly together with those bits and pieces of the world that aren’t beautiful and magical. The same approach is used when it comes to the depiction of the fantastic aspects of the movie – magic here is just another part of nature, seen and treated with the same eye, yet still evoking a sense of awe and wonder.

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Wild (2014): In part, Jean-Marc Vallée’s film (based on a memoir)about a woman making a thousand mile plus hike through the US wilderness to conquer her personal demons is certainly made of the material of self help books, but there’s also actual emotional weight in Reese Witherspoon’s performance, in the way Vallée tries to make the rhythm of her days in nature visible, in the beauty as well as an amount of danger (usually in the form of threatening men who never quite get around to doing something to Witherspoon but also make clear that they very well could which is a thing we male parts of the audience should take a good look at) the film finds by the wayside, and in the film’s general lack of preachiness. I also rather admired the way Wild shifts into flashbacks that feel as associative as actual memory, suggesting something true about the way memories come to the surface of our minds.

Go for Sisters (2013): This is probably not the best or “most important” film John Sayles has ever made, but there’s so much unhurried beauty, and such a clear eye for the ways cultures and people intersect in border regions that it’s still impossible for me not to find it rather on the brilliant side. On paper, the plot could make a thriller, but in practice, this is a road movie about friendship, class, and borders that lets its dangers and crimes happen as just another thing coming up by the wayside.

This approach doesn’t feel slow or lazy but has a relaxed beauty mirrored in wonderful performances by LisaGay Hamilton, Yolonda Ross, Edward James Olmos and various others. Like quite a few of Sayles’s later films, this feels like a product of someone who has a lot to say about people and the very specific world they inhabit, and shares it thoughtful, without grand gestures. I imagine Sayles to be a very good listener.

Begin Again aka Can a Song Save Your Life? (2013): This film by John Carney is a bit of a Hollywood feel good film about the saving graces of music featuring Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo, but it comes about its positive feeling the honest way: by accepting the bad shit and thinking about ways to get through it. That some of these ways might not be a hundred percent applicable in real life seems neither here nor there – this is a film that cherishes hope, music and friendship so much it’s not a lie but a promise. It also has a better ending than you’d expect or fear.


Carney knows and understands music much better than many directors making films about musicians, so there’s a lot in here about the way songs and life intersect, the impact a song can still have on a life (and not just of those writing them), as well as the sheer joy of music. The music the characters make is also just right for them as well as the film. This is the kind of movie that really can make someone happier and more hopeful for a bit. At least this someone.

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Uncle John (2015): I feel a bit like a barbarian saying this, but despite being well-acted, beautifully shot, and all-around well-made, Steven Piet’s sort of crime drama, kind of romance, US post-mumblecore indie does very little for me thanks to pacing so glacial, calling it slow would be like pretending it is fast. There are quite a few scenes that are brilliant, clever, and effective but a viewer has to pay for them by suffering through long, long scenes of the characters very poignantly doing little of interest. I just found myself losing my patience watching it. It’s not only the slowness that bugged me, really, but that quite a few scenes seem to be only in the film to reiterate points about its characters it has already made twice before. As it stands, the film could lose a good twenty minutes of runtime and not say less but actually say what it has to say more effectively instead of dragging it out. I really blame the influence of mumblecore as well as a certain type of arthouse movie and their inherent unwillingness to edit things here.

Lone Star (1996): John Sayles does of course belong to an earlier generation of US indie filmmaking, and having spent his times in the (sometimes gold) mines of more commercial filmmaking quite obviously taught the man things about getting to the point of any given scene. Or rather, the points, for this – one of his best films perhaps even his best – is a film that speaks about a Texas border town and its history by way of its people, explores the idea and practice of real, metaphorical and ethical borderlines, the shaping of history and our stories about it, and understands how to draw complex characters and show complicated situations without ever feeling the need to show us every single interaction its characters have in excruciating detail. While it is a highly shaped tale, Lone Star still feels as if its storytelling came about naturally, by the by; there’s no grasping for moments of truth here, they just come, or don’t, as is their wont.


How Do You Know (2010): Theoretically, this is a light, fluffy and not terribly pointed romantic comedy deep from the Hollywood mills featuring Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd as two people finding one another in a time of personal crises, but because it’s written and directed by James L. Brooks, it is also a film that has a lot of fun with just letting (often wickedly funny) dialogue flow, knows how to shape the ensemble surrounding its stars into more than just a backdrop (which would be a waste of for example a very funny and ambiguous performance by Jack Nicholson). It is also a film about grown-ups growing up more instead of the sort of romantic comedy that pats its characters on the back for learning not to be complete tools, as well as one that comes by its emotional moments the honest way – by being about well-written and well-acted characters going through things that feel like movie-enlarged versions of experiences people might actually go through. I’m afraid real life does not have dialogue this good nor the appropriate happy end, alas.