May 06, 2001 08:58 PM
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From Homer to Shakespeare through Hemingway, Bergman and Columbine, death has always been the greatest life lesson-as long as it happens to someone else. So it goes for the children in George Washington, the cogent debut film of David Gordan Green.
Set in a rural Southern town where the races mix comfortably, and moving back and forth between three groups of characters-some children who play together, some men who work together, and some women and girls who groom each other and talk about men-it's a movie of two distinct characters: On the one hand, it often has the haunting, ethereal manner of Badlands and Days of Heaven, the two early films of Terrence Malick; and on the other, it has the improvisational rhythm of an edgier slice of life drama
like Kids or Ma Vida Loca.
The two moods don't always coalesce, and that may be Green's strategy. Life, he seems to affirm, runs the gamut from the ordinary to the profound, and somehow we have to make sense of its incomprehensible disparities. But even if his movie unwittingly shares two faces, and even though it's somewhat self-consciously derivative, Green is still an attractive new artist, and his movie is beautifully done, very moving and thoroughly sincere.
Best of all, George Washington takes us to a seldom-seen milieu: Although filmed in North Carolina, it reminisces about Green's boyhood in Texas in a town just like the one portrayed in the movie. Race is never an issue among his characters, and regardless of whether that's possible, he creates a scenario in which it occurs. So when workers have conflict on the job, it's about the surly boss or their dining habits-a topic of conversation egged on by a fellow who eats healthy foods and who tells his indifferent colleagues, ''When I go to the bathroom, I like to be proud what happens.''
But this guy's alimentary cogitation is nothing compared to Nasia, a wise 12 year old who dumps her bespectacled 13 year old boyfriend Buddy for the mature and sensitive George, an unkempt boy who wears a helmet to protect his infant soft fontanel from fatal injury, and who's come to adopt a sweet but mangy stray dog, unbeknownst to his volatile caregiver uncle.
Nasia is our narrator and her enigmatic reflections-always sage but sometimes ironic-make the Dawson's Creek kids sound like Rugrats. She strolls around her bedraggled rural landscape, looking for clues to God's mysteries and mistakes. She believes the grown ups in her town never had a chance to be kids because they fought in wars and built machines. But when she she looks at her own peer group of young teenaged friends, she sees goodness in them despite their wayward lives. And when she touches one of them, she pretends she can see right through to the bone.
Then a child in the neighborhood disappears. And while most of the townspeople think he just ran away, three of them know the very different truth. The two spirits of Green's movie come together in the sudden, short and extraordinary moment of revelation, at once simply horrifying and eerily abstract. In that moment, George Washington feels transcendent and real, shocking and fascinating, tragic and unforgettable.
