David Gordon Green

This past weekend I had a crash course in the work of writer/director David Gordon Green. Green has made three movies and I caught two of them, George Washington (2000) and All The Real Girls (2002). The movies themselves were pretty good, but the directing was fantastic. David Gordon Green's style of direction is unique to modern cinema in that it emphasizes subtlety and realism over flashy camera moves or cgi special effects. In both films, Gordon Green favors multiple characters searching for redemption in a rural small town setting-sort of like a Bruce Springsteen song come to life.

In both films, Green's direction matches realistic scenes with dreamlike interludes. More than any director since Robert Altman, David Gordon Green captures the speech patterns of normal, average people. There are characters searching for what to say, people insisting on the wrong information (in Girls, a character who claims to know spanish insists mujer does not stand for woman. It's senorita only!) and awkward silences. Dialogue scenes play out with a hightened realism usually found in reality tv, but the scenes are framed by interludes of country scenery moving quickly to indicate the passage of time and unify the scenes. Gordon Green also pays special attention to establishing characters and developing them as people with hopes, fears, dreams and regret. Patience is a virtue with Gordon Green, who allows scenes to play out slowly removing much of the "Hollywood" from his scripting.

In George Washington, part of the story revolves around a group of children as they play in the pool and an abandoned bathroom. The lighting and character interactions recall that bit of timelessness from childhood when there was an endless amount of time to kill. The unglamorized settings and honest dialogue brought back those memories of when you could waste a day playing with garbage. David Gordon Green pulls natural performances from both non actors and professional actors.

Unfortunately, in the case of both movies the stories the overall stories are a bit of a let down. George Washington centers on a group of kids, mostly African American, who cover up an accidental death of their friend. The story gets a little quirky and unrealistic towards the end and the death of the young kid seems a touch heavy handed for such an understated film. However, even when the story gives out 75% of the way through, Gprdon Green's direction and strong perfomances by the amaturish cast keeps it going.

For All The Real Girls, the story is pretty much a straight up "chick flick" with boy meets girl, falling in love and the eventual betrayal that always follow in movies of this type. The actors are a little more professional this time around which tightens up some scenes. The movies' strength is that we are pulled into caring for the characters in a genuine way which makes the machinations of the storyline more heartfelt. Sadly, mechanical is how the story plays out and even with all the positive features to the film it drags down under its predictability.

In the end, George Washington (5 out of 10) and All The Real Girls (6 out of 10) both seem like progress reports for a talented filmmaker on the rise. Hopefully, Gordon Green will have a classic film in him soon.