Beyond the Multiplex

12 films to watch for in 2008. Plus: An interview (and podcast) with John Sayles about his latest film, "Honeydripper," starring Danny Glover.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Independent Film, Beyond the Multiplex, Salon Conversations

Jan. 3, 2008 |

With a hip-hip-Happy New Year to all of you, here's the latest conventional wisdom on the state of the movie business: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. Everything is subject to change, and in William Goldman's famous phrase, nobody knows anything. On one hand, bellyaching continues (including mine) regarding the impending death of moviegoing. On the other, it was pretty much a ka-ching Christmas season for mainstream and independent film alike, and many of you who weren't dragged by family members to "Alvin and the Chipmunks" or the latest "National Treasure" installment saw other things. Moderately surprising other things, I have to say.

We have a whopping surprise indie hit this winter and it is -- no, not "No Country for Old Men," although that will pile up plenty o' loot on the way to multiple Oscar nominations and beyond, and not Paul Thomas Anderson's massively hyped "There Will Be Blood," which has opened prodigiously in New York and Los Angeles but may prove too long and too dark for mainstream audiences. No, the avalanche-force, market-changing sleeper hit of 2008 is Jason Reitman's teen-pregnancy comedy "Juno," which rocketed to a box-office take of $26 million over the holidays and looks likely to take down "No Country" (currently at $42 million) as Indiewood's reigning champion.

Memo to all movie bloggers, gossip-mongers and insider's insiders: You can officially stop talking about the next "Little Miss Sunshine." At Sundance this year, the only acceptable market-savvy phrase is, "Where's 'Juno'?" Got that? Thanks. That's the latest, at least until the latest becomes something else. (If you're an ex-stripper with 40 pages of zingy dialogue in your desk drawer, get an agent now. If you're not yet an ex-stripper, or a stripper of any sort, there may, just barely, be time.)

Where does this leave someone like, say, John Sayles? Possibly up the creek with a busted banjo for a paddle, and you know the creek I mean. I have mixed feelings about the 19 feature films Sayles has cranked out since 1980, but I'm sorry, you've gotta love the guy. He's never approached his work with the slightest tinge of pretension or preciousness. His producer and principal collaborator, Maggie Renzi, has also been his domestic partner since they met at Williams College in the early '70s. (They've never married.) Sayles has labored tirelessly to gain the freedom to make his own movies, working on numerous Hollywood projects as a writer and script doctor for hire to pay the bills. (He's a credited writer on such upcoming films as "Jurassic Park IV" and "The Spiderwick Chronicles," but it's widely known, for instance, that Sayles did an uncredited rewrite on "Apollo 13" shortly before production.)

Snooty art-house critics like me sometimes rough up Sayles' films, which don't tend to be cinematically or dramatically adventurous and sometimes feel like they're offering a predictable blend of progressive politics and Dickensian morality tale. ("Silver City" was somewhat of a snooze, for example, despite Chris Cooper's memorable turn as a dimwitted, George W. Bush-like cardboard candidate.) Honestly, it's time to get over that. Sayles' movies almost always offer terrific casts, ample compassion, tremendous local color and an appetite for exploring the complexities of American life.

"Lone Star," Sayles' biggest success to date, holds up (to my taste) as one of the most compelling American films of the late '90s, and "Eight Men Out" is one of the best baseball dramas ever made, even if that's admittedly a weak category. "Honeydripper," his new movie about the moment when rhythm & blues became rock 'n' roll -- which Sayles situates in a fictional Alabama town in 1950 -- isn't quite in that class, but it's an engaging, high-integrity picture featuring one of Danny Glover's best performances and a strong supporting cast that includes Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Stacy Keach and Vondie Curtis-Hall, along with real-life blues-guitar prodigy Gary Clark Jr.

Amid the cinematic maelstrom of the last month, you probably didn't even know there was a new John Sayles movie, did you? As Sayles himself puts it in our interview, he's out there yelling on the street corner, and the people on the other three corners have bullhorns. Also this week, we've got a New Year's tradition of sorts: an impromptu, almost-all-guesswork guide to the most exciting films (that I haven't seen yet) of the next six months.

"Honeydripper": Rock 'n' roll and the civil rights movement, before anybody called them that
Harmony, Ala., does not seem like a friendly place to be an African-American businessman in 1950, but Tyrone "Pinetop" Purvis, the piano-playing saloonkeeper played by Danny Glover in "Honeydripper," has done more than make the best of it. A weatherbeaten man of uncertain age with a shadowy past, Pinetop has gone his own way, continuing to book aging blues artists at the Honeydripper Lounge even as younger black audiences have drifted away to electrified, hard-driving rhythm & blues.

Glover's Pinetop, a man distinguished by public pride and private shame, is the narrative and moral pivot point of "Honeydripper," which is less a portrait of the Jim Crow-era South than, like most of Sayles' movies, an effort to capture and distill a moment of American contradiction. As Sayles says in our interview, Pinetop is as old as the 20th century and has grown up with blues and jazz; when a young drifter with a homemade electric guitar (played by real-life Texas guitar whiz Gary Clark Jr.) arrives in Harmony, Pinetop finds himself half-accidentally standing at a crossroads of musical and cultural history.

Although Sayles is sometimes accused of ham-fisted politics, "Honeydripper" handles its Southern milieu with delicacy. While the regime of white supremacy is always present like overlying weather, and Sonny, the young guitarist, is summarily "sentenced" to unpaid work in the cotton fields, the town's corrupt sheriff (Stacy Keach) is not without a degree of humanity, and Pinetop himself is a complicated figure who's not above jealousy, deceit and small-mindedness. In an effort to save his club, he books the New Orleans hit-maker Guitar Sam, but when Sam gets arrested in Arkansas, Pinetop remembers the young drifter with the funny-looking guitar, and observes that nobody in Harmony is likely to know exactly what Guitar Sam looks like.

"Honeydripper" offers a leisurely, atmospheric production with lots of time to appreciate his largely African-American cast, along with rocking musical interludes and just the faintest wash of spirituality. (This comes in the personage of another real bluesman, Keb' Mo', playing a street musician named Possum who seems to offer prophetic visions and to come and go with startling suddenness.) As Sayles explains, trying to get people out to see the damn movie is now part of the independent filmmaker's job, and he phoned me one night just before Christmas and did his part. (Listen to a podcast of my interview with Sayles here.)

Next page: The Honeydripper All-Star Band hits the blues-fest circuit