It's taken Ballast three years to reach UK cinemas since its triumphant debut at Sundance, which is entirely apt, as the film itself has a certain timelessness working in its favour. This low-budget tale of miserable lives unfolding around the Mississippi Delta is so devoid of flashy contemporary trappings it could have been made any time between Charles Burnett's key Killer of Sheep (from where it appears to inherit its interest in African-Americans scratching out an existence on or around the poverty line) and David Gordon Green's early North Carolina sagas (with which it shares a non-professional cast, and some decidedly languorous rhythms).Writer-director Lance Hammer puts centre stage a heavy-set, world-weary fortysomething who might lay good claim to being the most unfortunate individual in screen history. First glimpsed in situ after the death of his twin brother, the bereft Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Jr.) tries to shoot himself, only to be spared by paramedics; returning to his dingy homestead from a spell in hospital, he discovers somebody's broken in and stolen his gun; the gun will eventually be used to hold Lawrence up, repeatedly, by a teenage punk who turns out to be the fellow's own nephew. I know it's hard out there for some folks to catch a break, but around about this point, you come to wonder whether Ballast isn't beginning to push its dramatic luck.
The kid, it turns out, has problems of his own, drifting away from a loving mother, and into debt, crime and drug abuse. With Hammer an as yet unknown force on this side of the Atlantic (his most prominent credit to date was a visual effects supervisor gig on Batman and Robin, believe it or not), we might venture a secondary authoring presence for Ballast in the form of Lol Crawley, the British cinematographer of 2008's Better Things, where - once again - the characters were caught out, horribly exposed, under vast, overcast skies, from which misery upon misery appears to rain down.
This tendency to view the characters as victims above all else, coupled with the eye-strainingly low light and sometimes mumbled dialogue, makes Ballast at the very least a challenging watch; it's the kind of filmmaking you want to lend 10p for the meter, and I suspect some will be tempted to walk away around the half-hour mark, when the characters bottom out and whatever narrative there is begins to have a little heat put underneath it. Life does get better, and easier, from here on out, even if it's only by increments. In the meantime, Ballast's calm and patience do come to feel like valuable alternatives to the present movie climate, allowing Hammer the time to observe such textures as blood being mopped from a shack wall or boots trudging through mud, both markers of forward progress in the protagonist's life.
Like Burnett and Green before him, Hammer has an eye for those moments that make this day-to-day existence in any way bearable: the boy playing makeshift baseball with a discarded trainer, a low-energy trolley dash around the late brother's grocery store. I wasn't as knocked out by Ballast as many have been on its long journey to these shores. Its attitude towards these characters' poverty isn't clear enough, and its technical limitations are just that, rather than a hidden strength or indicator of authenticity. Yet its battles do feel hard-won, and the whole project is marked by a fierce determination to scratch something out on the margins about a part of the world, and the kinds of lives, we may not have seen very much of. There is promise in these rough, sometimes crude-looking strokes.
Ballast opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
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