Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Nicole Riegel
Starring: Jessica Barden, Gus Halper, Pamela Adlon, Becky Ann Baker, Austin
Amelio
Rising British star Jessica Barden makes an impressive play for
American stardom in Holler, the feature debut of writer/director Nicole Riegel, who expands
a 2016 short here. And what an American movie Holler is,
dealing with the much publicised plight of America's heartland.
Inspired by her own experiences of growing up in smalltown Ohio, Riegel
has found a striking metaphor for the situation many American working
class towns find themselves in as their once thriving industrial assets
are strip-mined by Chinese businesses, taking the jewellery from the
rotting corpses of the rustbelt.
Barden plays Ruth, a teenager who rarely finds the time to attend school
but who has been accepted into college on the strength of her talent.
Trouble is, with her father nowhere to be seen and her painkiller-addicted
mother (Pamela Adlon) stuck in the county jail, Ruth can't even
begin to think about raising the necessary funds for a third level
education.
While Ruth dismisses the notion of college, her protective older brother
Blaze (Gus Harper) insists on finding a way to get her out of town
before rust envelops her own ambitions. The pair accepts a well-paid but
highly illegal job in the town's one thriving business, a scrap metal
dealership run by the Fagan-esque Hark (Austin Amelio). With so
many factories left abandoned in the area, Hark and his crew of misfits
are sitting atop a goldmine. Moving into a spare room in Hark's house,
Ruth and Blaze are put to work breaking into derelict and sometimes not so
derelict properties with the instruction to "follow the wires" and strip
any copper they can find.
In my own life I've had well paid jobs I despised and low paid jobs that
were a lot of fun. The difference was the people I worked with. If you're
part of a good crew, no job is a chore. This is something
Holler understands, as Ruth finds a kinship with Hark and
his employees, who spend not only their working days together, but their
leisure time, throwing drunken parties and visiting the local skating
rink. The danger of course is that you can become comfortable in a job
that's beneath your talents, and while Blaze is happy that he's gathering
together the money to send his sister to college, he's also worried that
she might be enjoying her work a little too much.
As it's based heavily on her own experiences, Riegel's film has an
authenticity that steers it away from the realm of "poverty porn." Life is
certainly tough for the inhabitants of this corner of America but it's no
misery fest. Here are people making the most of the cards they've been
dealt and refusing to wallow in their hardship. When we see White working
class Americans portrayed on screen it's usually in a negative and
stereotypical light because most of the people who make American films
don’t come from communities like this.
There's a touching scene in which Ruth is complaining about her mother and
a family friend (an excellent Becky Ann Baker) explains that she's
simply a victim of the opioid crisis, having become addicted to
painkillers prescribed by an unscrupulous doctor. It's easy to roll our
eyes when we hear about so many working class Americans having a distrust
of science and refusing vaccines, so it's refreshing for a movie to take
the time to remind us why this might be the case. These are people who
have been consistently betrayed and lied to by the powers that be.
It's in its final third that Holler begins to lose its
footing. The gritty, believable realism takes a turn with a dramatic
incident that the film never really reckons with, and it all wraps up with
a predictable ending straight out of Good Will Hunting.
Some reviewers have sniffily dismissed Riegel as a Debra Granik imitator,
as though there's only room for one female American filmmaker to chronicle
working class life. Holler may not fully satisfy in terms of
offering an original story but it offers a cast of characters with
refreshingly calloused hands, led by a performance from Barden that
suggests that much like the young lady she plays here, she has a bright
future.
Holler is in US cinemas and on VOD
from June 11th. A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
