The dawn of American neorealism?
If "independent" is indeed a relative term, it would be hypocritical not to extend that relativity to the very lowest financial rung of moviemaking, the place where movies like Eric Eason's Manito reside. The Focus Features movies Far from Heaven and The Pianist, for instance, are independent compared to The Matrix Reloaded, but compared to Manito, the Haynes and Polanski films seem like pampered Hollywood blockbusters. Like the dramatically inferior but still interesting Washington Heights?which shares some characteristics with Manito, including a digital video format, an Hispanic New York setting, unknown actors, a tragic finale and a lovable hero with a dad who owns a bodega?Eason's movie was made beneath the industry radar. (Its broad-shouldered leading man, Franky G., has since become a rising star.) The situations are familiar not because they're cliches in movies, but because they're cliches in life. (How do you think cliches end up in movies?) Manito works because of its minute observational powers. Like Who's That Knocking at My Door and Laws of Gravity, super-hard New York indies whose basic storylines were older than the tectonic plates, this one is mainly a triumph of atmosphere and acting?a starter movie that's equally interesting for what it is and for what it promises.
G. plays Junior Moreno, a Puerto Rican ex-con. He's got a wife, a family, a not-too-legit contracting business and a sense of macho entitlement that will be familiar to all who grew up working class, regardless of ethnicity. He's a hothead, a hustler and a philanderer who's been getting his own way for so long that when he lies to his wife about where he's going, she doesn't even bother trying to believe him. ("Whatever," she keeps repeating.) Yet there's a streak of real tenderness in this barely reformed thug. Junior seems a survivor of the cycle of violence, but the more time you spend with him, the more you realize that he's still its victim. He despises his dad (Manuel Cabral), a bodega owner and onetime drug dealer who made him act as a lookout and courier when he was younger. He loves his kid brother, Manny (Leo Minaya), who's about to graduate from high school and go on to college. He's a magnificent brute?like Victor McLaglen's character in The Informer, James Caan in Thief and Jean Gabin in almost anything. (G. has some rough moments of novice emoting, but he compensates with a quality that can't be learned and certainly can't be faked: life force. Eason and his crew have the same quality.
The movie's occasional jerky zooms, too-dark wide shots and too-close close-ups ultimately matter less than the movie's rhythm, its attitude, its energy. I'd rather not summarize the plot, which will seem either predictable or inevitable, depending on if you like the movie. Suffice it to say that Manito builds to a wrenching, believably bleak finale, and that once that finale arrives, the movie simply stops. (Some reviews have complained about this, but it felt right to me.) Eason and his talented cast and crew seem to have taken their cues from the improvisational naturalist strain of independent cinema?a strain that embraces documentary values, and that is less concerned with technical perfection and grand artistic statements than with capturing momentary, ephemeral moments of truth.
It's a stylistic school that's as old as cinema, but that didn't gain a somewhat formalized set of principles until Roberto Rossellini shot Rome, Open City back in 1945. Rossellini choreographed nonprofessional actors against real (often large and public) situations and photographed the results as they flowered. His sincere, alternately artful and artless approach was called neorealism. It influenced many subsequent filmmmakers and filmmaking "schools," from John Cassavetes' semi-improvised hothouse melodramas through the 70s movies of Scorsese, Hal Ashby and Sidney Lumet, and the collected works of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Spike Lee, the Dogma filmmakers and their American cousins. The superb 2001 Chinese drama Beijing Bicycle?on video, and definitely worth a look?can trace its creative roots back to Rome, Open City. So can Last Resort, a great British indie that had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it New York theatrical run back in 2001. But perhaps the most artistically significant descendant of Italian neorealism is the Iranian cinema. Iran has produced features shot in a variety of formats (everything from 35mm down to consumer-model DV); directors shoot in real locations with nonprofessional actors and care less about drum-tight plotting and purty lighting than moment-to-moment human interactions.
Factor out its urban American cultural details, and Manito could be an Iranian movie or a neorealist Chinese drama. (It would fit nicely on a double bill with Beijing Bicycle.) Like other good, superlow-budget efforts, it made me think that the term "neorealist" needs to be dusted off. The term represents, quite literally, a reality check. Its a necessary antidote to Hollywood values?values that, judging from the snide comments that routinely appear in reviews of any feature cast with unknowns and shot on video or in small-gauge, grainy film formats, appear to have spoiled and corrupted the tastes of otherwise intelligent film critics. (If one were to insist to the if-it-ain't-on-35mm-it-ain't-cinema crowd that music isn't really music unless it's a classical piece performed by a minimum of 12 musicians, or that a painting isn't really a painting unless it's in done in oil on a huge canvas, they'd rightly laugh in your face. But consistency isn't a value they prize.)
I'm pleased that so many recent examples of neorealist moviemaking have gotten attention, because attention is at least partly the point? thankfully, it's not the whole point. I'd like to think someone somewhere will give Eason more money to make his next movie. If that doesn't happen, I can't imagine he'll curl up in a corner and curse his fate. More likely he'll haul out the same equipment and make another good little movie that's interested in the real world and the people who live in it.
The new American neorealists have yet to produce a Rome, Open City?and Manito, notable as it is, will never be mistaken for a masterwork. Yet I still think people like Eason?and George Washington director David Gordon Green, and Personal Velocity director Rebecca Miller, and Raising Victor Vargas director Peter Sollett, could be the creative saviors of American fiction filmmaking, if the industry would have the guts to give them a comfortable budget and leave them alone. The great critic James Agee put it nicely in his 1946 review of Rome, Open City. The movie, he wrote, "was made on a good deal less than a shoestring; mainly without sets or studio lighting; on varying qualities of black market film. All sound, including dialogue, was applied later? Nearly the whole cast was amateur. The result is worthless to those who think very highly of so-called production valyahs? But plenty of people realize a point that many others will never understand and that there is no use laboring: some professional experience is exceedingly useful and perhaps indispensible, but most of the best movies could be made on very little money and with very little professional experience."