In the outskirts of the outskirts, a film crew led by cousins Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos documents the lives of three adolescent boys, 12 year-old Appachey, 13 year-old Andrew, and 15 year-old Harley, as they go about their daily lives. Over 18 months the boys confront life and all its inequalities with a mixture of goodwill, apathy and bullish determination, each fully cognisant of hand they've been dealt.
The film makers dodge open polemic, and to their film is all the stronger for it. What they present here are the voices of the disenfranchised, powerful purely because it can heard, slowly breaking.
The timbre differs from boy to boy. Appachey has a brow-beaten grunt; Andrew, a welcoming drawl, and Harley, struggling with the loss of his mother and some pretty serious anger management issues, an obstinate, sometimes confronting bluntness. The boys' honesty, and their frankness with some extremely heavy topics, translates into heartfelt drama which is difficult to compartmentalise into easy boxes. Rich Hill is shatteringly successful in contextualising the American poverty line without ever asking anyone, its audience or its subjects, to wallow. If anything, we are expected to take note, bear witness, then to celebrate the small victories.
Backing up his film's honesty, Andrew Droz Palermo's camerawork surveys Rich Hill with an observant, inquisitive abandon. Uninhibited, his focus shifts imperceptibly, sometimes on his young subject, other times on the ramshackle surroundings. He finds real run-down beauty in the town's dilapidated fringe and that beauty gives Rich Hill a certain grace. A grace undeniably spurred by Nathan Halpern's atmospheric score.
Yet, for all this, Rich Hill isn't poetic, at least not in the traditional sense. There is no concerted push to find an inherent truth in the boys' lives or to fetishistically aestheticise them. There is just the boys' lives. If there is poetry here, it is a stunted acrostic, the kind school kids are forced to write about their feelings. Artless but somehow revealing.
★★★★
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