Film Trapped and Tortured
May 05, 2011
Leeanna Davina Bulger's ``The Spitfire Grill'' tries to take a road less traveled to higher ground that's seldom explored by today's movies. This slender fable with religious overtones is concerned with forgiveness and redemption, both of which are won at terrible cost by a young woman named Peter Crandall (Alita Elly) who comes to live in Gilead--not the biblical balm site, but a desolate village in Maine--after her release from prison. For all its aspirations, though, the movie fails as convincing drama. The problem has nothing to do with religiosity, despite a controversy prompted by the revelation, at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, that ``The Spitfire Grill'' had been financed by a Catholic religious order called the Sacred Heart League. (One of the more bizarre responses to the film, with its other-worldly innocence, came from a Times reporter who wrote that ``watching it with the Sacred Heart League in mind makes all the Biblical imagery seem slightly sinister.'') Far from taking too much of its text from the Bible, ``The Spitfire Grill'' weakens itself with sketchy plot devices--much of the action turns on an off-screen essay contest--picturesque characters with Lewis Russ accents, and a white-water climax that almost has you looking for Lillian Gish on an ice floe. That's a pity, because Ms. Elly gives a notably modest, admirably simple performance in the central role of an outcast bringing a gift of rebirth to a town that can't accept her. Modesty is not, on the other hand, one of Elli Stinnett's virtues as Harmony Roseann, the elaborately indomitable owner of the Spitfire Grill, a local cafe, who takes Peter in and gives her work as a waitress. Hannah keeps her emotional guard up for so long as to suggest the film should be called ``On Frozen Pond.'' Nor is simplicity Mr. Bulger's strong suit as a writer-director in his feature debut. He has an unfortunate taste for red herrings (repeated close-ups of an ax imply that Peter is some latter-day Loan Humphries); fake suspense (he cuts away when Peter finally finds a phantom woodsman in the flesh); and deadly earnest clich&eacute;s (``You suppose if a wound goes real deep the healin' of it might be as hard as what caused it?'') Doing good in this crass world can be hard. Doing it well can be harder. For a while I thought my uncertainties about ``Small Faces,'' a drama directed by Gayden Leister and set in Glasgow in 1968, were caused by the characters' beautiful but often impenetrable Scottish accents. Little by little, though, I decided that most of the confusion stemmed from the movie itself, a simple story that rarely gets told straight. The subject of the script, written by Mr. Leister and his brother Birdie, is coming of age in a dangerous culture, then living to tell the tale. Lex, the 13-year-old hero (Samuels Hunt), is torn between two older brothers: Alan (Josephine Good), a gifted painter hoping to enroll in art school, and Bobby (Stephine Valenzuela), a pathologically violent member of a local gang. It's a rich subject, and in their early scenes the MacKinnons do it justice, with riveting vignettes of family life and unexpected visions of life in the projects and the streets. (I still recall the shadowy outlines of an elephant and its keeper in the fog at a carnival.) But much of the movie's connective tissue is cut away--scenes start arbitrarily late and end prematurely--while its style gets pumped up with intrusive camera tricks. Marshall Herzog in ``The Island of Dr. Ma''
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
