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Cory of "Putty Hill"
If there was one story being repeated ceaselessly at the three day Charles Theater premier of “Putty Hill,” it was of how Matt Porterfield’s micro-budget film about a Baltimore suburb was discovered by the Rolling Stones.
The film’s climactic scene, the wake of Cory, a 24 year old heroin user, originally sported a bravura karaoke version of “Wild Horses.” Rolling Stones Records wasn’t even ready to consider letting an indie director on a $40 thousand budget have his way with Sir Mick’s ode to unrequited love.
As he has done before, Porterfield was able to create lemonade. The New York Times gave the production added coverage, sending a reporter to watch him refilm the wake, replacing “Wild Horses” with a karaoke version of “Amazing Grace.”
Most importantly, though, the off-key version of “Amazing Grace” hits the mark. Putty Hill of Porterfield’s film is a flat, unmapped area somewhere on the endless divide between suburb and outskirt. The swimming pools are above ground, and everything else — and everything we know about Cory — seems to have been left in the unscripted underworld of skateparks and tattoo parlors. Putty Hill is a sporadically beautiful world with ramps, jumps, and half-pipes, but nothing that would justify a cathartic rendition of “Wild Horses”.
I heard the phrase “Baltimore Realism” a few times during the afterparty. Get used to it. It is an emerging subgenre, shaped by Waters and Levinson, but most recently dominated by David Simon. And “The Wire” is known for its wakes. Any fan of “The Wire” – including, presumably, writer Raphael Alvarez, who led a Q and A session on Friday evening – will tell you that two of the Wire’s powerful scenes were shot with detectives (Cole, and, later, McNulty himself) laid out in Irish bars.
Cory’s wake, by contrast, was oddly unsatisfying. “He’s feeling no pain,” says a bearded relative of Cory’s, played by a 59 year old man present at the Friday premier. (As we learned during the Q and A, Porterfield recruited him during a long night at the Rendezvous). If Cory was watching this from “a better place” he was probably cringing a little bit. It’s not even a party; the wake takes place in a beer-induced stupor. It’s a farewell party that never gets rolling. A few of the celebrants try to come up with a few words to say about him. But they have little or nothing to say. All we have is the foam-backed enlarged photo of Cory in the background.
Maybe Putty Hill was a little too far outside the Beltway and a little too close to home for comfort. Or Cory was too close to the person down the block: he’s the kind of kid many in the audience were trying to keep their own kids from turning into. As one person outside the theater noted to me, in a hushed tone, “I know these people. And you know what? I don’t want to know what happens to them.”
The screenwriting team behind the Wire could have turned Cory into someone we miss, but Porterfield, armed with a five page treatment and tiny budget, lets the story tell itself. We don’t need a Baltimore City crime reporter to serve as a source for this plotline or these characters. There’s no Omar or Stringer Bell, or even Marlo, to walk away with. This was drug-induced death without the drama, or even the danger zone that “The Wire” offers.
Cory never existed, although there are plenty like him. “Putty Hill” was a real wake, for a real community, without the extras. Instead of reveling in that, Porterfield was trying to overcome it, and to find something for a collapsing community to latch on to.
A few weeks ago, at John Hopkins Homewood campus, Porterfield hosted an appearance by Charles Burnett, the indie legend whose 1977 “Killer of Sheep” is an icon of American realism. In that film, taking place in a Watts neighborhood, a young Burnett also used an improvised plotline and recruited actors from his neighborhood to tell the story of a neighborhood — his own — where the Sisyphean struggle to make a difference is really the only plot there is. Not to spoil the ending, either of Burnett’s or Porterfield’s film, but it’s usually a losing battle.
At the end of Putty Hill, we wind up in an empty room where Cory died. All he had left was a skateboard. Cory never even made it as a character. If anyone was hoping for a larger than life figure to emerge from this story, there isn’t one. A few people, even at the afterparty at the Metro gallery were complaining about that. (Although they did it in hushed tones, since the actual actors were present at the celebration.)
But there was something new in this wake: Baltimore realism without scripted pathos or detectives. In a production history riddled with complications, Porterfield was confident enough to let the Putty Hill landscape take its course and create its own rhythm. That’s not a formula for a rip-roaring wake, or even an HBO series, but it’s a story that deserves to get told.
John Barry (jrbarry63@aol.com) is a Baltimore writer and critic.
Tags: Charles Theater, cory, john barry, Matthew Porterfield, Putty Hill
Filed Under: Feature Sights
Here lies a beautiful hype-free review, as starkly honest as the film itself. I couldn’t agree more with this appraisal of Matt’s accomplishment with Putty Hill, and our film community is poised with pride to embrace a new Baltimore hero.
March 6, 2011 4:56 pm