George Washington

A lyrical meditation on the fragility of human existence, David Gordon Green's directorial debut George Washington is one of the funniest, most tragic and mesmeric American independent films of recent years.

Set in Northern Carolina, in a rural, run-down town, the story focuses on a group of young friends who spend their time hanging out in the local trainyard, bothering the workers, and roaming derelict buildings, deserted playgrounds and riverbanks. The scene is set by a twelve-year-old girl, Nasia, who narrates some of the events from her point of view. Having made the decision to finish her relationship with one of the boys, Buddy, believing that he is too immature for her, she has set her sights on George - George who one day wants to be president of the United States. Green is self-confessedly influenced by the films of Terrence Malick, in particular Days of Heaven (1978), and Nasia's flat tones recall those of Linda Manz's - superficially worldly-wise yet truly innocent - and also hint at Sissy Spacek's mix of romantic yearning and pragmatic distance in Badlands (1974). Sidelined from the group, Nasia is absent when a tragic event occurs that affects all their lives, variously wracking them with guilt, remorse and doubt.

Unusually, the film renders the emotions of the children as complexly as any adult's. Treated with a seriousness and dignity, well tempered by gentle humour, at times they actually seem more self-aware than the adults. Exploring their environment, both physically and spiritually, they think about life's big questions, discussing the nature of relationships, the meaning of love and friendship, birth and death. During the main opening scene in which Nasia finishes with Buddy, like a doomed romantic hero he pleads, "Tell me that you love me one last time", then asks uncertainly, "Do you love me?" The performances are uniformally excellent - a cast of unknowns and non-professionals, their ability to exude such a sense of artless bewilderment and knowing maturity seems all the more remarkable.

With no clear delineation of good and bad, each of the film's events, however small, seems full of significance and complexity. This is a world, for instance, in which George's uncle - forever marked by his own moment of childhood vulnerability - can viciously kill the boy's dog and then make him a hat out of the animal's skin because he knows that the helmet the sickly George has to wear pains him. Stubbornly embracing the American dream, desperate to be a hero, George dons superhero garb and performs good deeds. It is highly unlikely that George, an African American from the wrong side of the tracks, is ever going to become president and the irony of that is not lost: the dream and its nightmarish underbelly permeate the film but never overshadow it.

The atmosphere, and our response to it, is heightened by its look. Rather than shoot on grainy stock or use hand-held camera angles to aesthetically emphasise the 'realistic' deprivation of this milieu, Green and cinematographer Tim Orr, paint their vistas in glorious Cinemascope. This is the kind of colour that picks up the subtlest differences in the colour and glow of people's skin. The piles of iron and waste in the trainyard, and the junk in the backyard, take on a compelling beauty. The presence of the sun evinces the lazy haze of summer months, and the film's measured pace, the lingering, time-filled days. At once languorous and emotionally charged, the human drama of George Washington is coruscating, and offers an extremely satisfying cinema-going experience on all levels.

Reviewed by Hannah Patterson