Putty Hill is the perfect film to take in if you’re looking for a dramatized documentary that dabbles in a white trash aesthetic. It creates an experience that is sort of like The Office meets Gummo, but with the minimalism of a Sophia Coppola film. Been looking for something like that? Yeah, me either, but it isn’t a terrible watch. It tells the “story” of a lower class Maryland town that is reacting to the overdose death of a young man named Cory. I put the word story in conspicuous quotes, because what Putty Hill is couldn’t quite be described as that. It’s really a fly on the wall look at a few different young people as they get ready to attend Cory’s funeral, interspersed with a few faux documentary interview segments to keep things interesting. Saying that it is a story would imply that things happen to the characters, but that isn’t really the case. And how you respond to what you’re seeing relies mostly on your own mindset. Putty Hill isn’t an exploitive look at white trash life like something along the lines of Gummo, or even a nightmarish vision of it like Winter’s Bone, its just a mirror held up to the lives of people who are stuck in a world that offers no upward mobility, and who have seemingly no desire to go anywhere anyway. As a matter of fact, the residents of Putty Hill seem to be so secluded in their little lower class world that they might not even realize that there are other options out there.
Within the first fifteen minutes or so of the film we get bombarded with a bevy of lower class white culture. There’s paintballing, heavy metal, tons of cigarettes, and doughy girls shoved into way too small clothes. You keep waiting for something to get played for a punch line, for the filmmaker to tip his hat and let you know that it’s okay to laugh at what’s on screen, but that moment never really comes. We get a sequence where the film stops to let us hear one of the character’s mothers sing an original song at her kitchen table. The song is bad, but not ridiculous or incompetent. You’re kind of left with the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing how to react to what you’re seeing. I kept asking myself why the director, Mathew Porterfield, was showing me the things that he did. But I don’t know if there is an answer. In one scene, one of the kids the film briefly focuses on skateboards into a corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes and a single pickle. It was the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen in my life, but the film glides right past the moment like it didn’t even happen.
Really there were only three moments over the course of the movie where I felt that the filmmakers were self aware about what they were putting up on the screen. The first was a scene in which four teenage girls are lounging around and talking in one of their bedrooms. At one point we get a slow pan across the room, which is jam packed with years worth of accumulated possessions, graffiti over every inch of the walls, and stain over every inch of the carpet. It was a showy thing to do with the camera, letting you know how hard they worked when location scouting to create a sense of authenticity, and it took me out of the film. What’s the point of going above and beyond to make things look lived in and real if you’re going to linger over them in a self-conscious way that reminds me what I’m watching is all play acting? The second two scenes were moments involving old people that were just too overtly funny to not be purposely conceived of and played for comedy. One in which a retired grandmother gives a monologue about how much she appreciates the comedic stylings of Reba, and the other when a Santa-bearded old man cuts a mean rug at Cory’s karaoke party/wake. If I didn’t get these indications that, at least on some level, the film was attempting to be cinematic and entertaining, I might have walked out of the theater much more confused about what I had watched. For most of its runtime Putty Hill feels very authentically like a documentary.
Its script couldn’t possibly exist as much more than bullet points. The interview segments all feel very legitimate and improvised. The dialogue scenes are so mundane that I can’t conceive of very much crafting going into them. People just make small talk. There are no character arcs, no themes being explored by what they say, it all just feels like time spent with undereducated, unmotivated young people. A lot of the time we watch as people do not much of anything at all. This film rivals Somewhere when it comes to scenes where a stationary camera sits pointed at nothing happening on screen. It’s especially noticeable during two scenes where we watch a tattoo artist giving tattoos in his cramped living room. We sit, unblinking, watching him tattoo customers. During the first scene we get the characters making small talk about time served in jail, and in the second we hear only the song “Birthday Sex” playing over the soundtrack. And speaking of the soundtrack, for much of the film we get nothing but silence to color the scenes where nothing is happening; or, more accurately, the sound of wind being picked up by the mics. Other than “Birthday Sex”, and a couple of instances where the actors themselves sing songs, the only hint of music I detected as soundtrack was a very faint rendition of the theme song from the video game “Tetris” playing as the teenage girls walk through the woods. Weird.
The one big dramatic scene of the film occurs when the character of Jenny has a crying fit on her absentee father’s back porch. It’s the one time we see a character longing for something else and not really knowing quite what that is. But, even then, things aren’t played cinematically. The shot we get is pulled far back, giving you the sense of being a voyeur prying in on a moment that you shouldn’t be seeing. You don’t even get to see any of the actress’ performance because you’re seeing it from such a distant, stationary vantage point. I couldn’t tell if her crying was believable or not. Adding to the feeling of authenticity, the girl who plays Jenny, a Portugese-American pop star named Sky Ferreira, is the only known personality in the entire cast. Most of these other actors don’t even have IMDB entries. It feels very much like Putty Hill is just real people who live in lower class Maryland giving us a mostly realistic look into their lives.
And, largely, the lives these people are leading are pitiable and depressing. They’re dressed stupid, they look stupid, they live in falling apart houses crammed full of junk. They have drug habits, criminal records, and when they die their funerals are karaoke parties with bad audio setups and pitchers of cheap light beer being poured into plastic cups. And there’s a lot of spitting in this movie. That’s something I haven’t seen since high school and had kind of forgotten about; meathead dudes constantly spitting on the ground everywhere they go. Why do they do it? They’re like animals marking territory with urine. There’s one scene where a young girl is interviewed in the back of a cab while she lets her too long hair just blow around all over her face that affected me. I saw a lot of symbolism in it, and that was probably just me projecting. I couldn’t understand how she could let her hair blow around, covering her eyes, getting in her mouth, and looking ridiculous like that without fixing it. It suddenly became a visual representation of everything I was feeling about these people’s lives. They have a willingness to let things happen to them instead of taking control. I saw it in a scene where a young stoner can’t comprehend why he should volunteer to mow his mother’s grass, in one where a guy in his twenties lives in a ramshackle house with no furniture, and in the account of a drug addict who couldn’t kick the habit before he injected himself straight into the grave. As I was thinking about all of this, I realized that Putty Hill wasn’t exactly an entertaining experience, but at least it was making me spend some time analyzing it’s characters. Perhaps that’s the reason why it never picks a clear tone. You’re supposed to bring whatever you have in your own life and let that form your reaction to the film. I grew up near people and places that looked very much like Putty Hill, and I found myself repulsed by what I was watching. Might somebody more ingrained in this kind of culture have no reaction to it whatsoever? Could somebody from a more posh background think of it as a charming slice of working class life?
