by Jameson Draper
Baltimore is a great American city. Once upon a time among the most prosperous cities in the country, it fell along with the empire; once deindustrialization hit the country, Baltimore was too far gone with its segregation practices and white flight to maintain any sort of economic viability. The working class collapsed and so did much of the infrastructure along with it. But Baltimore survived despite it all, because of course it did. Always a city of enlightened minds, the last several decades have seen the city rebound via transplants, artists, and a commitment to steadfastness. This resilience, combined with forgotten throngs of people who never left, has given the city a very specific and undiluted pride.
That pride in the city is evident in everything Baltimore. It’s not just a sense of place that gives Baltimoreans pride (although they have that in spades, too), but pride in the city’s authenticity. However, it is an unfortunate truth that much of the media depictions of Baltimore fall strongly on one end of the spectrum. The Wire, or John Water’s early films like Pink Flamingos, are great examples of wonderful art that is ultimately reductive, voyeuristically painting a portrait of a city whose uncouth underbelly is its dominating force. You also have the flipside, like Anne Tyler’s Baltimore novels or Barry Levinson’s films, which paint a quaint if urbane and quiet emptiness of sequestered middle-class life. Not to say that neither of these exist in Baltimore, but so much of this town lies somewhere in the monotonous middle.
Matthew Porterfield’s Hamilton, his feature film debut that has become almost lost media, authentically embodies that monotonous middle. Hamilton takes place in the outer-ring northeast Baltimore neighborhood of the same name. The film’s sense of place is stunning, with lost young adults attempting to navigate the quiet spaces in a forgotten nook of a forgotten city: wandering down old city streets at dusk beneath the tender glow of crosswalk signs, sunbathing in cheap pools behind outdated and large homes, smoking cigarettes on the banks of a tiny creek in a city park. It doesn’t idealize these places, but it refuses to turn this tepid humdrum into ruin porn. In the summer winds of a Mid-Atlantic weekend, a young woman and her child plan to go on a trip to Maryland’s Eastern Shore countryside for a month to visit family— a bucolic respite from the emotional grayness of everyday life in Hamilton. The mother, Lena (Stephanie Vizzi), hopes that the father of her child, Joe (Christopher H. Myers)— who also seems to be a childhood friend— will come to visit her and her child before they leave. She often speaks about his absence as a father, but one gets the sense she misses him too, but is perhaps too prideful to admit it. Beneath long takes of trees blowing in the warm breeze and blue hour twilight of sparse street lamps, this is solidly a summer movie, teeming with real life and real people and real stories. Based on the accents from the actors in this film (most of which have no other acting credits), one can safely assume they are all Baltimore natives.
Though there is little dialogue— Hamilton is a tonal poem, originally intended to be a silent film— it tells a story with a brooding rhythm. The characters are fleshed out, full of interiority; it’s easy to believe they’ve lived a full life before the cameras began to roll, a life that will continue, too, once they stop. The characters, in equal measure, fight back against their squalid conditions with a quiet dignity, refusing to let their evident baggage become their whole identity. Lena scrawls hopeful letters on nude posters in last-chance desperation to save the love she lost, the love which seems to have created more problems than solutions. Joe himself struggles to be a father, but doesn’t want to admit it. All the money he earns mowing lawns goes to raising a child he doesn’t seem to want; he exercises his control and rage through drinking alone, chain smoking, and playing video games at three in the morning. But he refuses to be a complete deadbeat; just before their trip to the Shore, Joe comes around to spend some time with Lena, and though he ends his night playing video games, to be in the house at all is better than to be absent. When he rides on his bike toward Lena’s house at the end of the film with flowers, ostensibly for her, the fibers of his facade are broken down; as viewers, we can see that he is bursting with humanity. But it may be too late— interspersed with shots of his frantic biking, we see Lena in the flatbed of a pickup truck stuffed to the brim with luggage. They are leaving town.
In Hamilton, nobody does anything too far out of the ordinary. Nor does anybody do something dramatic. This is a self-contained story of regular people in a small place at a specific time— the loose-fitting tank tops and baggy shorts are unmistakably mid-aughts— simply living, nothing else, balancing their desolation with small pleasures. In its quiet profundity, there’s something so beautiful in that subtle kindness and virtue, for at least they have loved and lived.
This is a film that came out in 2006. Not long after, this rudderless generation (and all who have come after it) was swept up in the mindless escape of technology. We are no longer forced to face the immediate; even if life has always been difficult, it’s hard to watch this movie and not yearn for a lost time when this dull pain was part of the journey.
Joe is a bad father and desultory youth, so what else could explain the rapturous emotions we feel as viewers when the woman with whom his relationship has long since crumbled sits up in the dead of night and tenderly kisses his shoulder as he slams on the controls of his stupid game? Because we have lived, too, and we know how it feels to be wanted and needed, especially in our most unglamorous moments. We know what love is, and if we’re lucky, we know what it looks like, too.
I would be remiss not to mention the form of this movie. Jeremy Saulnier’s cinematography is ethereal and integral to what makes Hamilton work. It is dreamlike in its utter and unabashed realism. Its naturalism and disinterest in explosive movements hearkens back to something of a Rohmer film without the dialogue. At times its stunning eye for natural beauty in the most unlikely places is Malickian. It’s not a coincidence that legendary film critic Richard Brody called it one of his favorite films of the 21st century. But to compare this movie to cinema’s greatest heroes still feels reductive; its voice is singular. Unlike Rohmer, there is barely any dialogue. And unlike Malick, the setting almost singularly tells the story. Baltimore itself is a character, and each quiet moment— mowing lawns, riding in trucks, smoking cigarettes on a darkened street, resting on an old ratty couch, or braiding hair on the porch— all make this serene film sing. And not only does its sense of place reinforce its visual authenticity and feeling, but the diagonal crossed lines of the church facade, the angled interiors and staircases, and the straight lines of city roads, billboards, and truckbeds are almost Antonioni-esque in portraying a world where we strive to connect in spite of the cold, unforgiving external universe around us.
This is functional beauty and tonal poetry in its highest form. Hamilton creates a rare and transcendent raw congruity: something profoundly dreamlike and sensationally realistic in one stroke, a small masterpiece from the annals of the obliterated American class.
****
Jameson Draper is a writer from Detroit, Michigan. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. He loves his gray cat, a crisp negroni and a baseball game on a summer night. He is endlessly frightened, and is wondering if he could maybe have a bite of your shawarma. Follow him on Twitter @jamdraper.