American Fable

American Fable

11-year old Gitty (Peyton Kennedy) listens to her father(Kip Pardue) say that where we are living right now, the farmlands of Wisconsin, is the best place in the world. But later she asks him a question: Why don’t we go to any of those countries that I have seen on the globe in the library? He hesitates for a moment, and then in his face she sees something like fear. If she leaves when she’s old enough, does that mean she is rejecting his way? His tomboy daughter, who can only be herself with jokes and riddles; will grow up and leave him. Loss flits at the edge of this quiet moment. These are just two small scenes from Anne Hamilton’s first feature as a writer/director they are also the entire story.

The rest unfolds against an Edenic landscape of beauty and color and strangeness, weird nesses poised between life-giving and malevolent. Hamilton has built a surreal, magical atmosphere for this melodramatic family thriller; it is all about atmosphere. From the opening shots forward, she sustains its fever-dream mood; and if her interest in smaller moments pierced with intimate reality suggests that this isn’t a first feature at all but rather one by someone more experienced than Hamilton could possibly be well, so be it. “American Fable” may sometimes seem ambitious to a fault, but there is a wild pleasure in watching such boldness of style pursue what it knows about itself.

Gitty lives on a farm with her hard-working father ( Kip Pardue), pregnant mother(Marci Miller),and an older brother Martin (Gavin MacIntosh) whose “teasing” of his sister runs closer to psychopathic cruelty than anything else. It’s 1982:Reagan is on television, and every day another Midwestern farm goes bust as agribusiness swoops in to snatch them up for a song during foreclosure. The family breathes this toxic air, and we hear them screaming at one another from behind closed doors.

Gitty’s father is approached by a mysterious woman (Zuleikha Robinson) in long black leather gloves and a Betty Grable up-do, who seems to know him. She speaks to Gitty’s father privately at the county fair. Dark forces gather around the family unit. Gitty doesn’t have many friends nor does she need them. She has her chicken (named Happy), and eyes open wide. She is a curious child. When her father tells her to stay away from the derelict silo at the edge of the back field, she can’t help it. She sneaks out to investigate, finds a man locked inside.

Because the entire film is shot from Gitty’s point of view with very few deviations, it is not clear whether or not there really is a man in that silo at first. He whispers urgently for her to let him out. He tells her he will give her whatever she wants if she helps him. He’s like part troll under bridge and part genie/fairy-godfather. His desperation is palpable. He is played by Richard Schiff, who should be in everything. And as his story unfolds, as Gitty gets closer to him on these secret visits they share together, he opens up dark rooms in her family; disturbs depths capable of destroying them all.

Hamilton and cinematographer Wyatt Garfield have soaked the movie in otherness, beauty, shadows and deep colors, anxious camera angles that tilt the world on its axis. (Hamilton cut her teeth interning for Terrence Malick during “Tree of Life.” She has a similar reverence for nature, and different kinds of light.) Before the man in the silo, before the woman in the gloves even before those things can happen we already know that everything is not right with this world. A normal family dinner crackles with tension; the camera pokes up from beneath a table. With its first shot Gitty pushing her way through ranks of towering corn “American Fable” announces itself as such.

A fable. When you are very small, you go up against forces as baffling and unified as these stalks of corn that stretch forever into an useable distance. The dread is all around Gitty: There’s a figure on a black horse seen on far-off horizons, crossing fields; circling houses. Something is coming for this family. Maybe they brought it upon themselves. Production designer Bret August Tanzer has turned this farmhouse into something terrifying and beautiful: The walls are green like envy, red like blood; night shines through windows cold and blue. This is not your everyday American heartland farmhouse: It’s an emotional nightmare-scape.

Young Peyton Kennedy is a revelation: When her father tells her a bedtime story (she asks for a scary one), she listens to him with engagement and wit, prodding him along between lines with little comments and laughs so natural that it grounds those scenes (and their relationship) in the real world rather than some sentimentalized version of it we’ve all seen before. Over the course of the film’s 96 minutes (Kennedy is in every scene), she must move from innocent to experienced; from oblivion to knowledge and she gives an adult performance in her understanding of that painful coming of age arc.

“American Fable” wears its symbols on its sleeve, like a short story does sometimes; they don’t have the weight or the resonance that some of Hamilton’s single images do: Gitty dangling from a rope, surrounded by the dark walls of the silo; children catching fireflies at night in big jars; a truly spooky dream sequence; the colors inside that farmhouse, the look on Gitty’s mom’s face when Gitty asks if God really loves them. These are the moments that stick that persist once the movie is over. What tells this story more than plot, more than symbols is Hamilton’s images.

(There should be a moratorium on using Yeats’ poem “Second Coming” in film. It is one of the most powerful and prophetic poems ever written but it has been so done to death, it is a cliche.) “American Fable” is an elegy to a way of life that has all but vanished, and a phantasmagorical imagining of what something as real-world as the farm crisis looks like and feels like, especially through intelligent child’s eyes. Loss pulses through every frame here. It’s a very strong debut.

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