Little Accidents

"What do you think it's like to die?" Owen (Jacob Lofland)

It's a given that tragic death in a small town stays forever, impinging on virtually every life now and hereafter. First-time writer-director Sara Colangelo's Little Accidents, set in a coal town, echoes The Sweet Hereafter's frozen aftermath of children's deaths aboard a bus plunging into a pond. Both involve decisions to reveal or not the culpable parties; both intercut among those players who are most affected by the tragedy.

Young Owen (Jacob Lofland) witnesses the death of JT (Travis Tope) and hides the truth. JT is the son of manager Bill Doyle (Josh Lucas) and Owen is a deceased coal miner's son. The accident that killed his dad and nine others is under investigation as the union fights to suppress testimony from conflicted survivor Amos (Boyd Holbrook, who reminds me of Keith Carradine) that would incriminate the coal company and shut down the mine.

You can see the inter-connections, as is true in any small town, and the inherent conflicts, exacerbated by the closeness and the sometimes illicit connections, such as JT's mom, Diana Doyle (Elizabeth Banks), and Amos. Colangelo keeps the plot slowly moving ahead while some characters and events border on the formulaic. When Owen helps Diana with her garden, the plot takes an unfortunate contrivance tack. Yet the drama is still effectively bound to us as figurative for communal responsibility and domino-effect relationships and tragedies.

Cinematographer Rachel Morrison effectively creates the working-class milieu, much as in Out of the furnace, in part because she uses a great deal of natural light reinforced by old-fashioned 35mm film. It's not a gloomy world, just one dominated by grey skies and dim futures. No sunshine can mitigate the sense of loss pervading the town. These Accidents are hardly little.

I wasn't planning to attend Little Accidents when it screened at the Seattle International Film Festival. With 450 films from which to choose, a film about a coal mining disaster sounded depressing. However, when I was sent a free pass from SIFF, I went anyway.

Not only was I was pleasantly surprised by Sara Colangelo's debut feature film, I was moved by it. Little Accidents is the type of film that stays with you long after the lights come up.

Although it is a coal mine disaster that sets the events of the film in motion, the action begins months after the accident, as Amos Jenkins (Boyd Holbrook) returns to his life in the small West Virginia town after convalescing from injuries that he sustained in the accident. He is the sole survivor.

Life is anything but normal as Amos finds himself torn between telling the truth about the cause of the accident, and keeping his mouth shut, which will dishonor his ten friends who died. If he testifies that management's cost-cutting decisions led to the disaster, the mine will be closed and his friends and family will be left without any way to feed their families.

Just as the town is beginning to deal with the loss of the miners, the son of one of the mine's managers (Josh Lucas) goes missing. Is it retaliation or a freak accident? Young Owen, played by Jacob Loftland (Mud), who is the son of a killed miner, has the answer, but he deals with his own struggle to reveal the truth.

The character-driven film follows the seemingly parallel story lines of Amos, Owen and Diane Doyle (Elizabeth Banks), the mother of the missing boy, but eventually the parallel lives begin to intertwine as they find themselves connected by fate.

The performances by everyone in this film, especially Holbrook and Loftland, are superb. A touching scene between Amos and Diane outside a convenience store nearly left me in tears.

Although I felt the relationship between Amos and Dianne could have been developed further, I was fully satisfied by the completion of the plot lines and left feeling blown away by the entire experience, which was enhanced by the attendance of the director, Colangelo.

Colangelo directed a 2010 short by the same name, which deals with issues of the working class. She wanted to set the expanded feature film in a mining community, after being moved by so many recent coal-mining accidents that she was unable to get off her mind.

One interesting piece of information that Colangelo provided was that the movie was shot in 24 days and entirely in film, in order to capture the grittiness of the subject matter. Kodak donated half of the film.

Little Accidents isn't so much a film about a coal mining disaster as it is a film about loss and how we choose to deal with the tragic events that occur in our lives. Of all the films I saw at SIFF this year, this is my favorite.

The film is set to be released in January 2015. Go see it!

I appreciate there may be temptation to "feminize" certain narratives but a mining disaster film is not one of them when the narrative's main tension is whether or not the protagonist male is or is not going to say one thing or the other. That was the tension in the film that was poorly developed in order to develop a side-bar that of itself was not developed either but was there in my view to justify Elizabeth Banks' character's errant behavior. As it was, her husband's character barely got a look in, despite his being blamed for the fandango, facing ruination and despite having to deal with the same (side-bar) loss as Elizabeth Banks.

I am not sure what the film was trying to say and therefore I give it only a 7. This said, the performances were super and the photography very impressive. The director (who also wrote this) has a very strong talent in my view but must resist the urge to feminize narratives to the point of it losing focus on what the central drama is: men losing lives and whether the mine will survive (to the relief of the remaining miners) or close on account of compensation payments that will bankrupt it (to the relief of the families caught)

The actors gave decent performances and as someone who's lived in a small town, I thought they were believable in their roles. Unfortunately there just wasn't anything to the story or the movie. Prepare to be bored.

This film tells the story of a mining town struck by a tragic mining accident. The after effects have far racing consequences to the residents in the whole town.

"Little Accidents" is a very dark film, so dark that it dragged my mood down within minutes of watching it. It captures hopelessness, helplessness and desperation of many individuals in the town, no matter what social stratum they belong to. The sadness lingers on throughout the film, because of unfinished businesses which should provide suspense but instead gives a haunting atmosphere. The ending gives a little closure to some of the subplots but not all, leaving businesses unfinished. I am so saddened by the film, it's very powerful.