Hale County This Morning, This Evening

If you follow your neighbors around for 24 hours you will discover that they are mostly very boring people. That's what we have here. This barely qualifies as a documentary. Unless you like seeing a toddler running around in circles for four minutes, you're not likely to enjoy this. A waste of time for everyone involved.

This film, with its free-form flowing scenes of life in Hale County has been praised to the skies by various critics, and in many ways deserves it. That said, sadly all of them have missed its indebtedness to 'A Shimmer of Possibility', a very influential 12 volume photographic work/ book released by Paul Graham in 2008. It pioneered the flowing visual poetics, into a stuttering non-narrative vision of everyday life, finding beauty and meaning in the most ordinary of situations. There are extended film -like sequences of images at the core of this work, that remind me of 'Hale County', especially one of a young African American couple playing basketball in the twilight.

Mr Ross, clearly knows this work - he is an art-photographer and teacher himself - and Mr Graham's work was highly praised, and even given a solo show at MoMA, NYC. RaMell Ross has absorbed the lessons from this work, and transferred them to his film-making, with great skill. The success is his, and I don't wish to take away from it, but it is important to acknowledge a debt and influence, when it is due.

This is the very definition of a "fly-on-the-wall/slice of life" doc. It's probably not your walls or your pizza, though. It feels like photography come to life. It is a pure artistic statement in that arena, no question. Whether or not these pictures are also telling a compelling story isn't quite as clear. Five minutes of a toddler going back and forth don't make sense until you think about it in the context of what happens to that toddler's infant sibling later on. Intermittently, we are interrupted by black title cards with white text, the most striking of which reads: "What happens when all the cotton is picked?" That this isn't so much of a question, perhaps, is maybe what the story is all about. In the 1990 power ballad by Extreme, "More Than Words," Gary Cherone sings, "More than words is all you have to do to make it real." You don't need to speak to tell a story. You don't have to do anything at all. As Steven Tyler of Aerosmith once sand, "Just Press Play" (on the camera).

As the title implies, days in the lives of the residents of Hale County, Alabama are chronicled in this documentary. Most of the residents are poor and black.

Director RaMell Ross has chosen a cinema-vérité or fly-on-the-wall approach which works often though not always. It works very well on scenes involving small children including the story of a family with twin babies. Sadly, many scenes linger too long and this film has less effect than a similar documentary also released in 2018: "Minding the Gap". The other film dug deeper in covering similar situations including the struggles of economic hardship for those already disadvantaged.

The pacing of "Hale County...." could have been improved though its laid-back approach can be credited for creating a peaceful mood.

Undeniably well made, this documentary focuses on the residents of this small town and shows their lives. However, i did eventually lose interest in it as there really isnt much forward momentum in the storytelling.