Hey folks, Harry here... Almost every screening I've ever thrown in Austin sells out, it was quite disappointing to see this screening not sell out as well. Sure, with the War on, the University of Texas Gals battling it out in the Final Four and most notably... another screening of the same film the next day in town... well, it wasn't exactly surprising. Just a tad disappointing. The audience that was there was captivated by LEVITY, the first directoral film of Ed Solomon, a screenwriter I met 4 years ago. I'll probably write the film up here in a bit... The themes of redemption and futility are a bit too wonderfully dead on for me to ignore. The performances and characters too well drawn to not spend a few hours contemplating and composing over. BUT FIRST... I want to give you over to 802. An odd spy name to be sure, but there are few film lovers like 802 and her husband 801. Named after their seats in the Alamo Drafthouse... it is a long story that perhaps I'll tell you someday... It'd make a great movie in itself. However, enough of that... here's 802...
My look at Levity
I’m always drawn to redemption stories, though too often they stray into syrupy, Kum Ba Yah-singing lovefests. As someone who spent 4 years as a death row lawyer, I know that these stories simply aren’t that neat. In actuality, the most difficult part of the job is dealing with the fact that your client is not the animal the newspaper clippings and trial transcript convey, but a deeply flawed human being who (usually) has done the unthinkable – taken another’s life with deliberated intent. And at that moment, two lives are “lost” and too many others deeply and permanently altered – this desperate sadness is precisely what Solomon manages to capture in Levity.
As part of Harry’s new series of premiere screenings for local charities here in Austin, I got tickets to Levity more in support of SafePlace than because of the film, which I knew only from the on-line trailer. With such a high-profile cast and an upcoming nationwide release, I expected a packed at house at the Alamo Downtown, so I was frustrated and complaining as we reached the theater less than 10 minutes before the screening. With mixed emotions, I discovered the theater half full and our regular seats available for us. For the people who passed on the screening to find out what was happening on Congress Avenue or join another vigil for peace, you missed out on a chance to see a solid film before its national release. After the screening, we were offered a tiny glimpse into the world of Hollywood filmmaking and financing via a Q & A with the film’s writer and director, Ed Solomon. It was a welcome change to meet a writer who talks to an audience with genuine interest and who’s confident enough in his intellect and abilities to avoid showing off his vocabulary when a single expletive conveys the meaning usually buried in an entire paragraph. Thanks, Ed, for reminding me what dogged persistence and risk-taking can accomplish (and the price for both). Levity is an unapologetic character study of four lives – the murderer Manual Jordan; the victim’s sister, a single mother of a son headed toward his own legal trouble; a pot-smoking, jazz-playing lying preacher; and a hard-partying lost soul. Without incredible casting and subtle genius in the writing, the character sketches are a recipe for melodramatic stereotyping and moralizing. Fortunately, Solomon’s writing works – there’s no ambiguity on the main points, but plenty left unsaid in the details. There’s no question that Manual Jordan murdered Abner Easley during a convenience store robbery 23 years earlier. Whether or not we should forgive him is beside the point, even though one can’t help wondering at what point the past is the past. When has someone beaten himself up enough for a wrong done that the rest of us can let it go?
Solomon also assembled an astonishing cast – Billy Bob Thornton (Manual Jordan), Holly Hunter (as the victim’s sister, Adele Easley), Morgan Freeman (the preacher Miles Evans), and Kirsten Dunst (playing Sophia, the lost soul). The actors perform with a range and depth only attainable when their motive for doing the film is something other than a large paycheck. Billy Bob Thornton, for example, takes himself a bit further than his recent roles in The Man Who Wasn’t There and Monster’s Ball – brooding, yes, but possessing a kind of deep questioning loneliness (why am I here?) that replaces the masked self-assuredness we’ve seen before. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay to Holly Hunter in her role is that she accomplished something for me few major actors do – I forgot she was Holly Hunter playing Adele Easley, and just saw Adele Easley on the screen. It’s the best performance I’ve seen from her since The Piano.
Each character in the movie is flawed differently, and every character demonstrates an ironic plea for redemption while knowing that redemption isn’t possible from without. It’s this web of emotion that allows the audience to identify with each character – even one who murdered a young convenience store clerk, Abner Easley, during a robbery 23 years earlier. I found myself identifying with the victim as well, whose presence eerily reminds us of the loss of human potential caused by a single bullet to the head. There is an agonizing scene where your sympathies are torn – you find yourself begging Manual not to do what you know he’s going to do (though you understand his desperate need for forgiveness), yet you find yourself angry because you don’t want Adele to be forced to carry a burden than Manual no longer can.
The movie takes place during the darkest part of winter – after the holiday decorations have come down and there are still weeks of snow and cold before the renewal of spring. The movie is allegory, and the details serve the metaphors incredibly well. Costuming is simple. The common mistake of dressing poor characters above their means is thankfully avoided, and Manual Jordan’s appearance places him just a step or two above the level of scariness that makes you to cross the street to avoid meeting him. You wouldn’t start up a conversation with him, but you wouldn’t run away screaming, either. Set design provides useful details in trying to decipher what’s going on between the lines. Manual takes a small room disturbingly similar to his prison cell in exchange for getting the partying suburban kids into the community center church for 15 minutes as payment for parking the car in the preacher’s protected lot while they go clubbing across the street. The cheap apartment Adele shares with her son provides telling details about Adele that she sometimes hints at, but never discloses.
The film lingers after the credits end. I found myself dwelling on tiny details and character quirks. How odd, for example, that both Abner Easley the murder victim and Sophia the lost soul tend to laugh when they’re nervous -- and how this piece of information fills in part of Manual Jordan’s mental jigsaw puzzle made up of images of the crime that remain vivid in his memory. And how does the tangible proof of his crime, in the form of a newspaper photograph of the young Abner that Manual hangs in his room and looked at in his jail cell every day for 23 years, affect Manual? And why, when offered the chance, does Manual not commit a crime in order to return to the prison where he believes he belongs? In Levity, Ed Solomon credits the audience’s intelligence and emotional sensibility, somehow avoids a preaching tone and, indeed, never offers up a moral to provide a tidy finale.
802
