It felt almost documentary-like to me in a lot of ways - especially in the way the story didn't necessarily feel like a standard 3-act structure to me but rather as a series of events or vignettes from Duff's life.
There were times when I thought the film felt overly scene-driven — that is, the scenes were a little too neat and self-contained. The editing might be mostly to blame there, especially the transitions between scenes. The dissolves and fades to black felt very conventional and even old-fashioned in the context of the more naturalistic style of the cinematography and performances — mistakenly imitative of
To Kill a Mockingbird or something like that.
Otherwise, the structure of the first two-thirds of the film is pretty great; very organic and low-key, but always driving forward. The movie loses a little momentum in Birmingham, maybe, but just for a bit. The scene in the diner (culminating in Will ordering Duff away) brought it all back together for me. That was about as grim and bleak a moment as we've encountered in this marathon — moreso than anything in
The Entertainer, even — and just viscerally so. It really hurt me, somehow.
The screenplay does get a little more conventional in the third act, with the low point of Duff leaving Josie then having the revelatory scene with Lee then picking up the boy and returning home. I was very conscious of that conventionality while watching, but I found it sort of irresistable nonetheless — maybe just because I so wanted Duff to return to Josie. I definitely could have done without Duff's final line ("Baby, I feel so free inside."), and I read somewhere last night that Roemer regretted that himself, so I'm in fantastic company.
Secondly, despite the fact that the film is very clearly talking about the issues faced by a black man and therefore seemingly political on paper, I love the way the movie feels entirely personal.
It was interesting hearing Roemer and Young on the DVD talk about how potential investors wanted the film to incorporate the civil rights movement more directly, maybe even include MLK himself or something. That doesn't sound like a horrible idea to me in theory, but I think the existing film is probably more powerful for focusing on the story of these individual characters and not turning them into archetypes.
I also really liked all the scenes where Duff and Josie are just flirting and being cute. So great. Like the scene where he bumps into her on the bus and sits on a separate seat till she asks him to sit next to her .
Yes, totally! And it's hard to imagine now what a rare sight that must have been in a movie in 1964 — between two black characters, I mean. And the film is great about capturing it as just the most ordinary thing in the world, without any teasing about how its breaking taboos or anything like that.
I've been thinking more about how the film creates such a strong sense of empathy, and, thinking back on it, it seems like the camera is almost always at eye-level with the characters, as if we're right there riding along in the car with Duff or standing beside him outside. So much of the film is told in medium shots and closeups, too. (On the DVD, Roemer wonders if they deliberately shot so much of the film in closeup because there was a kind of taboo about not shooting black actors in closeup. Young says he doesn't remember that being a conscious choice.)
Breaks from this pattern — high- and low-angled shots, extreme closeups, and long shots — come loaded with strong emotional connotations:
The tightness of the closeup on the mill foreman gives him a slight air of grotesqueness to his authority; the below eye-level framing of the other mill worker adds to Duff's isolation in that scene — not knowing who ratted him out, seeing that nobody has his back; the shot over the shoulder of Josie's dad is one of the few times in the film we ever look down on Duff, implicity seeing him through the eyes of the older, conservative preacher; and the low angle shot of Josie there is from the moment of reunion at the end, capturing the hopeful look in her eyes almost from the implied point of view of the young boy, who already sort of represents the characters' hope for a better future.
Tellingly, the most gut-wrenching moment in the film, when Duff pushes Josie down, starts in a medium two-shot, which Duff then breaks with his violent shove. The subsequent high angle shots of Josie on the floor and slightly low angle shots of Duff looking down on her represent very clear breaks with our normal, intimate perspective of these characters. In a sense, Duff pushes us away, too, and that heightens the tragedy of the moment.
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