Mention of “the Berkshires” conjures images of pastoral New England abutting major cultural institutions: The Norman Rockwell Museum, Mass MoCA, Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow. Every quaint town center enjoys an abundance of good ice cream and even better coffee. Hiking trails, historic mansions, craft breweries, and excellent restaurants stretch as far as the eye can see. What the eye can’t see, or refuses to see, is how these amenities are kept separate from farmland built against the backdrop of mountains and foreboding woodland. The Berkshires are beautiful, but boy, they can be harsh, too.
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Diego Ongaro focuses on the parts standing between the destinations The Berkshires is known for. No one wants to watch neorealist indie dramas about folks gallivanting around the Hancock Shaker Village or attending Shakespeare & Company shows. That’s boring. The richest material a filmmaker can find in this region lies in tougher areas where folks slaughter six cows a day before doing light logging to make ends meet. So goes the conversation Ongaro opens on in his new film, “Down with the King”: Bob (Bob Tarasuk), the lead and larger than life figure of Ongaro’s superb 2015 debut “Bob and the Trees,” casually cleans a pig while giving his celebrity student, Mercury “Money Merc” Maxwell (rapper Freddie Gibbs), an education in farm life.
Merc is Bob’s opposite in countless ways, but what matters most upfront is money. Bob damn near kills himself daily to make a few bucks. Merc is a celebrated rapper with cash to spare. He’s a purposeful fish out of water: Merc needs peace, quiet, and inspiration, essential components for producing his next album. Being a rap icon has its downsides in 2021. Every schmuck who wants a piece of you can have a piece anytime they want; all they need is to open Instagram. In another era, the hinterlands would fully insulate travelers from the world’s noise. The most Merc can hope for is the blessing of spotty cell reception and bad WiFi. Live sessions on social media are an unavoidable part of brand maintenance, and every session is an excuse for punks to manufacture beef. It’s exhausting, and Merc is clearly disenchanted with it all.
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So Merc hangs out with Bob instead of writing. It’s an unpleasant chore, but it’s real. Ongaro’s experience chronicling the lives of farmers on society’s fringe plays a critical role in “Down with the King.” Its spiritual predecessor, “Bob and the Trees,” is a bleak slice of life story about a struggling homesteader buckling under paranoiac isolation and the brutal conditions of 2014’s Polar Vortex. “Down with the King” recycles that atmosphere while wading through “dark side of the music industry” tropes. Merc’s value equates to his output. The pressure to knock out new tracks creates an environment of demand that scrubs away Merc’s humanity. There is no Mercury Maxwell. There is only Money Merc.
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It’s perhaps a minor fabrication that everyone in Bob’s orbit, and Bob most of all, sees Mercury as a person instead of a rapper. For Bob, this makes sense. His relationship with Mercury lets him indulge his love of gangsta rap, and Mercury’s relationship with Bob gives a new connection to his heritage. Mercury’s grandfather was a farmer. What Bob does for a living touches Mercury’s ancestral soul. But Ongaro doesn’t ignore the role of race in his story, either. How many Black American farmers do you know? The idea sounds alien even to Mercury and eventually feeds into character conflicts. Until then, Mercury is accepted for Mercury, for the most part; one old white man stares askance at him in a hardware store, and a violent incident later in the film whiffs of racism.
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Ongaro isn’t naive. He knows that prejudice and hate breed even in places with liberal reputations. “Down with the King” necessarily acknowledges race as part of Mercury’s emotional labor because how does a Black American man figure out who he is and who he wants to be without considering race? His mom, Darlene (Sharon Washington), visits and gives Mercury space to freely express race as a factor in his career, his interest in farming, and his presence in the Berkshires; his affair with Michaele (Jamie Neumann), Bob’s daughter, gives him respite from that dynamic, and a window into the realities of being trapped in a town this small. These perspectives, couched in the musician’s unrelenting grind, force Mercury to make choices about his identity, about his present, about his future. That’s a struggle, too.
Gibbs is the film’s center. He’s also the most unpracticed actor in the cast. Professionals like Washington, Neumann, and David Krumholtz, playing Mercury’s agent, give him stability. Still, to the surprise of no one who’s seen “Bob and the Trees,” Tarasuk is his best foil and most natural screen partner. Tarasuk gets to be Bob in front of a camera; Gibbs has the more challenging task of filtering his rap persona and his experiences in the industry into a fictional character. Because “Down with the King” enjoys its premiere at Cannes, and because festival reviews tend to invite aggressively purple qualifiers and an overabundance of adjectives from authors rushing to file copy, Gibbs’ performance will likely be described with such language as “haunting” or “bold.” The truth is that Gibbs looks tired, which Mercury is. He’s hooked up to an IV drip of unreasonable expectations from his bosses and his fans, drained of energy every day. Gibbs slouches. He saunters. The gravity around him feels heavier. He’s at his lightest farming with Bob, or privately reciting his salah, but his eyes always betray lingering fatigue.
It’s an impressive performance, and not without levity. Ongaro’s clearest antecedents are Kelly Reichardt and Agnès Varda, realists with sly, irrepressible humor that occasionally blends with their pursuit of the real. “Down with the King” has moments of warmth and laughter to contrast with the sobriety of Mercury’s self-exploratory malaise. Daniel Vecchione, reteaming with Ongaro after shooting “Bob and the Trees,” pairs contrasts in sensation with contrasts in setting; he captures the Berkshires’ idyllic and forbidding characteristics simultaneously and sometimes in the same shot. Harmony of emotion and visuals makes “Down with the King” a complete circuit. Each of its parts compliments the others. But in the end, the film remains humble as Mercury humbles himself. [B+]
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