Matthew Porterfield’s career is a testament to the artistic merits of keeping close to your roots. Born and bred in Baltimore, Porterfield’s films illuminate national currents like deindustrialization, drug culture, and masculinity in crisis without ever leaving the people and places Porterfield grew up among, giving his work an unassailable authenticity that shines brightly in an era of CGI and substituting Toronto for NYC. In fact, his films are so intimately intertwined with their setting that it represented a major shift when he started exploring different neighborhoods of Baltimore after “Putty Hill.”
READ MORE: Summer Movie Preview: 36 Films Worth The Watch
Porterfield’s latest, “Sollers Point,” takes place in Dundalk (for “The Wire” fans, this is Season 2 territory), where Keith (McCaul Lombardi, also from Maryland) is finishing up a stint of house arrest after prison and trying to get back on his feet. He uneasily shares a roof with his father Carol (Jim Belushi) and later we learn his mother died of an overdose several years prior. As Keith reenters the world, he seems well liked (except by his disappointed ex-girlfriend Zazie Beetz), yet he struggles to find an occupation or a source of self-respect, leading him to self-defeating displays of masculine bluster. After a failed attempt at HVAC certification, he slips again into drug dealing, as the only available source of quick money, but a tender encounter with a kicking addict shows that he might not be hard-hearted enough for that role either. Meanwhile, Keith tries to extricate himself from the gang ties he had to cultivate to survive in prison, without endangering himself through disrespect.
Porterfield completely immerses the audience in Keith’s psyche. Keith is instinctive, combative, inarticulate, and yearning, and Lombardi is able to convey that complexity in a thrillingly physical and non-theatrical performance. For all his complexity, his situation is simple; he’s poised on the fence between living legally and outside the law, and society thwarts his efforts to live legitimately. In keeping with Porterfield’s naturalist tendencies, there are no flashbacks or narrative tricks, other than a letter which Keith reads aloud that’s all the more poignant for the act’s apparent unfamiliarity. There’s virtually no exposition and the audience must piece together the context for themselves as they follow the restless Keith through his days. As such, many of the scenes gain power on reflection when considered with more information, such as two heart-breaking scenes with an addict about his mother’s age.
Two scenes that explore the neighborhood’s past as a quasi-company town for Bethlehem Steel (where Porterfield’s grandfather worked) provide some of the most potent context. In one, some of Carol’s friends are playing poker and reminiscing about how working at the plant made one instantly respectable, exemplified in a story about getting princely treatment from a car salesman. Coming at the end of the film, after Keith has been trying and failing to find any meaningful work at all, there’s a stinging sense of loss – America’s lost promise of well-paying blue-collar work that creates middle-class families. Invoking cars as a point of pride also insults Keith, who has to get by with a hand-me-down rustbucket while his father lovingly maintains his own classic car. The image of older white and black men together as friends is especially poignant in conjunction with an earlier scene, in which Keith’s black friend Marquis (Brieyon Bell-El) defends him from a white gang. Marquis does this because their fathers worked together at the plant, but the scene suggests that this connection is fading, that in the absence of the shared economic opportunity that turned their fathers into friends, racialized divisions are reasserting themselves in the next generation.
Porterfield keeps the focus firmly on Keith’s emotional state, but he excels at surreptitiously providing background and social context to such scenes. “Sollers Point” is an intimate and wise character study, not only of an unformed young man but also of a neighborhood struggling to preserve itself in the face of economic decline. [A-]