Like Nomadand, the dramatic thriller Holler looks at what ordinary people must do when they lose one economic opportunity after another. But unlike the characters in this year’s Best Picture winner, the struggling poor in Holler are not so ready to abandon their community. In their desperation, they turn to borderline criminal conduct. Director and writer Nicole Riegel declines to judge any of her characters, and instead shows how widespread poverty affects everyone a little differently. She does not quite stick the landing – the final act is a direct imitation of another, better film – although there are enough thoughtful details to smooth over that shortcoming.
Jessica Barden plays Ruth, a smart kid who is on the cusp of graduating high school, except her desperate search for money means she has little time for papers and exams. When the film begins, she and her older brother Blaze (Gus Harper) steal used glass bottles from a business so they can sell them to a scrap yard. Indeed, the scrap yard becomes the central metaphor for the film, a place where jobless people can sell fragments of their town back into the globalized economy that took their livelihoods in the first place. The scrap yard is run by Hark (Austin Amelio), whose methods are not always legal. Soon he recruits Ruth and Blaze to pull copper out of abandoned buildings, except the risks are rarely as great as the reward.
There are two concurrent stories here that comment on each other. There is Ruth and Blaze’s flirtation with crime, then there is the attempt to preserve some normalcy elsewhere. Both kids visit their mother (Pamela Adlon), a recovering junkie whose legal troubles prevent her from living at home. Ruth is a familiar type: as a teenager who was forced to grow up quickly, she is taciturn and impatient. She has little time for pleasantries, while her brother attempts to be more forgiving and keep it all together. The dialogue has an edge to it because we can hear the subtext of bitter past betrayals. Outside this broken family, Hark and Linda (Becky Ann Baker) provide a larger context about the hardship everyone faces. Everyone wants to work, except there are fewer and fewer places to look, and that is way harder than we realize.
In formal terms, there is an interesting incongruity between the image and sound in this film. Riegel opts for a “gritty” style: she shoots in muted colors on handheld 16mm film, so most of the shots have a desperate absence of light. The music by Gene Beck, on the other hand, is much more traditional orchestral score. The music guides the audience in what to feel, creating hopeful notes that do not necessarily match with the corresponding image. That tension helps make the film easier to take in, since the absence of music – or a different style altogether – might make the action too much to bear. By the time Riegel gets to sequences of modest suspense, including an unexpected shoot-out, the drama becomes more traditionally satisfying.
Through Barden’s uncompromising performance, we come to care about Ruth. Sometimes it feels like the audience cares about her more than she does about herself, which is no small feat. All that sympathy nearly disappears in the final minutes of Holler. There is an echo of Good Will Hunting, another film about a talented young person who faces economic hardship, and Riegler has no problem imitating that film’s final minutes, both in terms of resolved storylines and shot compositions. This mimicry is not enough to derail Holler because it remains a tough, thoughtful drama about flawed characters. Still, you cannot help but wonder what Riegler was thinking. If she wants us to feel some catharsis, why end her movie so we are thinking about another one entirely?
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