I'm baffled. I'm hypnotized by George Washington's ponderous long takes of nature in a run-down town, but I'm do remain baffled by its overall intentions. It's a portrait of a southern town so torn up by poverty that its pubescent main characters, less than a handful of kids droning through their days on the cusp of something less than inspiring, say it looks like it was wrecked by "two tornadoes." As the film begins there is a relaxed sort of meditation to each shot, because every one is held longingly; little details like bits of graffiti on sign posts are cleverly framed with as much care as young George Washington (Donald Holden), the daydreamer with a birth defect (he has a soft scull) turned self-described superhero after he rescues a boy from drowning. Tim Orr, the cinematographer who has worked with director David Gordon Green on this, Green's first film, and on each subsequent release (All The Real Girls (2002), Undertow (2004), and Snow Angels (2007), and coming in 2008, The Pineapple Express), adds a particular glisten to the mundane. Though, Green's audience is a select type, and probably the kind who frequents the art house theater over the scraggly backwoods residents documented in his film; the depleted country industrial town (and townspeople) is intriguing by virtue of the disparity of setting and lifestyle between them and the film's viewers. Which is not to say Green's film looks upon his subject with condescension; to the contrary he lets the dilapidated town of rusty cars and train tracks simply be, and rather beautifully. The characters speak with a flat inflection, with an almost forced naturalism in their exchanges. The words they say seem contradictory to their characters, overly philosophical in observation, but somehow likable and true. They speak in essence of the whole movie: beautiful, philosophically sweet, but not of any defined order or form.
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