Sayles, John

RE:UNION WITH JOHN SAYLES

I was recently prompted to revisit the work of a writer-director whose work I followed for decades, but whom I’d not thought about for some time.  Though I never knew him personally, John Sayles graduated from Williams in 1972, the same year I received my diploma by mail.  So I followed his career from the start, reading his well-received early novels Pride of the Bimbos and Union Dues.

[To fill in details on Sayles, I include link to his Wikipedia page, which in turn links to detailed pages on plot, cast, production, and reception of each of his films.  For a more ample career summary, see this Senses ofCinema survey.]

Right around 1980 I must have seen an early local screening of his first film, Return of the Secaucus 7, since so many of the cast and crew were recent Williams alums.  Sayles established his practice right from the beginning, financing his films from other screenwriting for hire, and operating with complete independence as writer, director, and editor.  He also established career-long associations with Maggie Renzi as producer, actress, and life partner, as well as actors like David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp.

Throughout this survey, I’ll be characterizing Sayles as groundbreaking and seminal, like a good husbandman cultivating the soil, rather than magical or transcendent.  And it starts from the very beginning, when he jumpstarts the American independent film movement, provides a first look at the generation of the Sixties turning 30, and sets the template for The Big Chill and many other reunion films.  Bring together a diverse cast, write literate dialogue for various scenes of encounter between different types, find an off-the-beaten-track setting, then place the camera somewhere functional to watch, and go for truthfulness at every turn.  He would follow this practice for thirty years and more.  One more element persists throughout his career, sympathetic music direction from Mason Daring.  This first film was made for sixty thousand bucks, but has been elected to the National Film Registry.

The “Secaucus 7” had been college-age antiwar activists, but unlike the Chicago 7, they were busted not at a demonstration but in a traffic stop on the NJ Turnpike on their way to a protest.  Now they are high-school teachers or med school students or political staffers or guitar-toting drifters, along with a couple of New Hampshire townies (played by Strathairn and Sayles) from high school days, so largely a cross-section of young professionals.  They don’t get too wild with drink or drugs, more inclined to volleyball and basketball, but they do skinny-dip and continue to express the sexual freedom of hippie days.  We get to know each of them a little bit, if we don’t already from past experience.  Not my crowd exactly, but one I recognize to this day.

I remembered liking Sayles’ second film Lianna (1983), apparently written before his more easily produced debut, but found it a real eye-opener on recent re-viewing, seemingly far ahead of its time in its treatment of a woman leaving her mad-housewife marriage for a lesbian relationship.  As the title character, Linda Griffiths might well have been one of the many actors that Sayles launched into successful film careers, but instead she became a playwright and theater actress in her native Canada.  The film’s matter-of-fact portrayal of a woman’s awakening to same-sex attraction was radical and honest.

Baby It’s You (1983) was Sayles’ one and only attempt to make a studio film, a never-to-be-repeated experience.  I haven’t yet had the chance to watch it again, but I remember liking it pretty well despite the commercial compromises involved, and also for Rosanna Arquette’s first starring role, as a Jersey JAP who falls for a sketchy Frank Sinatra wannabe.

When one door closes, another opens.  So just as Sayles rejected working within the studio system, he received a MacArthur “genius grant,” which allowed him to make Brother from Another Planet (1984), a socially-conscious genre exercise that foreshadowed a number of cinematic developments.  This sci-fi comedy, about an alien escapee being chased by “Men in Black” (Sayles and Strathairn), was Joe Morton’s first significant film role.  He plays the three-toed alien who happens to land in Harlem, and has numerous encounters with the inhabitants, in comic takes on race matters and everyday alienation.  The Brother cannot speak, but can read minds, and heal people and things by touch.  The fanciful premise supports a lot of faithful representation, as well as Keatonesque silent comedy.  These days, thankfully, we can look to Black filmmakers to reflect Black experience, but Sayles has had an enduring practice of diversity and inclusivity.  (Many early Sayles films were restored in 2002, but I happened to see a predated DVD that did this film no favors.)

With a union leader father, I developed a particular interest in films about labor action, so Matewan (1987) represented a convergence of concerns.  Sayles spun off the film from a story in his novel Union Dues, about an actual coal miner’s strike in 1920s West Virginia, which culminated in a gun battle between strikers and the company’s hired thugs.   Notable for the first film roles for Chris Cooper and Mary McConnell, Sayles’ casting is as usual fine across the board, with many of his regulars on board, including Strathairn, Clapp, and Renzi.  Cooper is excellent as the Wobbly organizer, who manages to band together the white coalminers, Italian immigrants, and Black strikebreakers (led by James Earl Jones) into a united front.  McConnell shines as a widow who runs a boarding house.  Strathairn is the local sheriff.  Sayles himself has a bravura scene as a fundamentalist preacher.  Cinematographer Haskell Wexler makes this one of Sayles’ better-looking films. It all ends in a Western-like gunslinger showdown that effectively melds history and myth.

The same melding of history and myth applies to Eight Men Out (1988), about the Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series.  In another convergence of interests, Sayles delivers one of the best (and most believable) baseball movies ever, with an impeccable cast.  Strathairn is the aging knuckleballer Eddie Cicotte, best pitcher in the game, agreeing to throw games to get back the bonus that skinflint owner Charles Comiskey cheated him out of.  Sayles plays sportswriter Ring Lardner, offering sardonic commentary on the evident fraud, with a sidekick played by Studs Terkel .  Among the Sox players are John Cusack, just before his breakout in Say Anything, and Charlie Sheen, just before he became Wild Thing in Major League.  Arrayed opposite them are a variety of gamblers and crooks, plus ass-covering officials, with the players taking the fall.  The story is complicated, but clearly told; painful but exhilarating.

City of Hope (1991) stands up very well, doesn’t seem dated at all – unfortunately – but more as if it were ripped from today’s headlines.  In retrospect, it plays like a precursor to The Wire, as the multifaceted story of a midsized NJ town that is one large web of corruption, racism, and intolerance. The story passes from one character to another, all eventually interconnected in a situation that cries out for help, where no help is to be had.  The adventitious widescreen camera transitions between characters are worthy of an Altman or Scorsese.  We follow so many distinct personalities and storylines as they intersect and veer off, for a truthful group portrait of a community under stress.  The script is typically literate and thoughtful, and the cast is well up to task of making a durable impression in passing.  Many Sayles regulars appear—Joe Morton, Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, Sayles himself.  I don’t know where he found the money to make this film, but he put it all up there on the screen, in a kaleidoscope of urban dysfunction.

Passion Fish (1992) is distinguished by economical but evocative location shooting, and reliance on sharp writing and naturalistic performances.  This film revels in its Louisiana bayou locale, and gives impressive expressive scope to two very fine actresses.  Mary McConnell plays a daytime soap opera queen, who’s been hit by a cab on a NYC street, and returns in a wheelchair to the ancestral home she fled in her youth.  Acerbic and self-pitying, she runs through caretakers, until the always-estimable Alfre Woodard arrives, with a will and a voice to confront the bitch-on-wheels on level ground, along with a backstory of her own.  The set-up is something like Persona, but Sayles’ treatment is quite different from Bergman’s, as the women’s head-to-head isolation is broken up by a variety of incursions from the outside and the past.  Wrenching at times, but more often funny, the film’s local color also includes some rousing zydeco sequences.  So as City of Hope seems to anticipate The Wire, Passion Fish seems to prefigure Tremé, if only in my own appreciation.

After Passion Fish, and certainly from The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) onward, Sayles seemed to set his films in places he wanted to visit, either for documentary or personal reasons.  Roan Inish, a departure in more ways than one, also highlights his continuing interest in folklore-ish stories.  Set in Donegal on the NW coast of Ireland, the story concerns “the island of seals” and the legend of selkies.  It’s told from the point of view of a young girl living with her grandparents, and longing for a return to their ancestral island, who learns about the selkie seals in her family tree, and the mystery of her infant brother drifting out to sea in his cradle.  Haskell Wexler’s cinematography imbues seascapes with meaning and beauty, and the myth with unvarnished reality.  Though suitable for children, this is not a kiddie movie in any way.

Sayles next traveled to the borderlands of Texas for Lone Star (1996), his most commercially successful movie, and one of his best.  Characteristically, the locale is economically evoked, and an accomplished cast amplifies evocative dialogue, and here especially, it’s telling that Sayles not only writes and directs, but edits the film, facilitating shifts in time and place.  Chris Cooper stars as the sheriff in a region along the Rio Grande, where enclaves of Whites, Blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans mingle uneasily.  His father was a much more dominant figure as sheriff before him; he’s played in flashbacks by Matthew McConaughey, back when he was deputy to an utterly corrupt Kris Kristofferson.  A murder is uncovered, and the son suspects his father as perpetrator.  Meanwhile he reconnects with his high school flame, now a teacher, played winningly by Elizabeth Peña.  Frances McDormand has a small but telling role as his ex-wife, right at the time of her breakthrough in Fargo.  The story is twisty and weighty, and its themes are as relevant today as back then.  For someone not familiar with Sayles, this would be an excellent place to start, displaying all his strengths, in something like a familiar genre mash-up of contemporary Western and mystery.

Rather than cashing in on relative success, Sayles crossed over the border and made Men with Guns (1997), an honorable but inert look at the havoc wreaked by competing militias in an unnamed Central American country.  This foreign-language film made no impression on me, and I didn’t track it down for a second look.

Sayles continued to subvert genre expectation with Limbo (1999), which left the viewer in just that place, but only after a canny sociological study of Alaskan life and commerce, with a sojourn in its majestic remote backcountry.  David Strathairn stars as the homeboy hero, high-school hoops star turned handyman, in an engaging elaboration of his role in Passion Fish.  Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is the out-of-his-league “chantoosie” from away, who defaults to him after a bad breakup.  She has a teenage daughter who falls for him even harder.  The three become involved in a caper instigated by his ne’er-do-well brother, chased by repeat bad man Kris Kristofferson, which leaves them stranded in the wilderness as an unlikely Swiss Family Robinson.  The unresolved ending infuriated some, but to me seemed like a fully-earned subversion of thriller tropes.

Moving from the extreme Northwest to the extreme Southeast, Sayles continued his exploration of the human dimensions of capitalist exploitation in Sunshine State (2002).   The expansive cast features Edie Falco, early in her run as Carmela Soprano, as the proprietor of an inherited motel in a down-market resort town on the Florida coast, hoping to sell out to developers with big plans for the area.  She develops a business and/or romantic flirtation with the project’s landscape architect, Timothy Hutton.  The developers have their eye on a section of beach that has traditionally been Black-owned.  Our point of entry into that community is Angela Bassett, who is returning after years of estrangement; she had been a high-school beauty queen in love with a big football star, sent into exile when she got pregnant, and only now returning from the north with her new husband.  Other familiar Sayles faces play different types of promoters and schemers.  A portrait of place as much as character, the film explores without driving toward any climax or simple resolution.

That’s even more true of Casa de los Babys (2003), which mixes and mingles with six white American women, waiting out a residency period in an unnamed Latin American country in hopes of adopting a baby to take to El Norte.  The extraordinary cast includes Marcia Gay Harden, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Daryl Hannah, Mary Steenburgen, and Lili Taylor.  Living in much the situation of their characters, the actresses do not improvise so much as embody the essence of the interactions that Sayles has scripted, in this essayistic survey of notions of motherhood and nationality.   Well worth spending time with them, even though by this juncture the critical consensus had hardened toward Sayles, as expressed by the NY Times critic:  His “social mosaics offer no pat solutions or happy endings, they are about as far as you can get from escapist movie entertainment and still call it fictional… [with] profound awareness of the degree to which the personal is political in everyone's lives, and the ways in which money, class and ethnicity shape our points of view.”  In other words, watching his films is like eating your spinach.  Me, I love spinach.

Bad reviews kept me from even watching Silver City (2004) until I was embarked on this survey.  This political satire verged on agitprop, and betrayed its evident intent to argue against George W. Bush’s reelection.  Chris Cooper is a W. clone, running for governor of Colorado, as the dimwit son of a political dynasty.  Richard Dreyfus is his campaign manager.  Though the cast is large and engaging, the film does not succeed so much in a Chinatown-like deep dive into political corruption, but comes across as a semi-serious whipping of the Bushes, which now seems like beating a dead horse.

I was definitely back on board for Sayles’ next film.   Honeydripper (2007), set in Alabama in 1950, has an almost entirely African-American cast, led by Danny Glover as the proprietor of the juke joint of the title. Filmed on location, as always, the cast is filled out with nonprofessionals for genuine local color.  Even some of the featured players are appearing in their first film, including Glover’s beautiful stepdaughter (model Yaya DeCosta, who steps nimbly from the runway into period character) and the itinerant guitar player she falls for (real performer Gary Clark Jr.).  Besides capturing the moment when the blues gave way to rock ’n roll, the film gives an authentic rendition of Holiness tent revival preaching, and doesn’t demonize whites while still making clear the realities of the Jim Crow South. There are no real surprises along the way, but this film takes you places you ought to go. 

Not so much for his next film, Amigo (2010), of which I have no memory, if I ever actually saw it.  It deals with America’s imperialist suppression of the Philippine independence movement around 1900.  Maybe I’ll watch if it ever becomes available to stream.

I did lately catch up with Go for Sisters (2013), another Sayles film set in border country, with two Black women and a Latino man as protagonists.  LisaGay Hamilton and Yolanda Ross are two former high school friends who used to be so close they could “go for sisters,” but when they meet again twenty years later, one is a parole officer and the other a parolee.  But the “good” one needs the help of the “bad” one, to track down her missing son, who seems to have been abducted by drug dealers.  They enlist the aid of a disgraced L.A. cop, Edward James Olmos, to navigate the cross-border underworld.  The characters are very interesting, but the crime thriller aspects of the film are rather confusing and un-thrilling.  It’s great that Sayles foregrounded Black female friendship, but even better that these days Black women are getting to tell their own stories.  So his niche as a white male preoccupied with under-represented populations has narrowed to near extinction.

John Sayles is an earnest, serious, straightforward writer and director, who rarely descends to the didactic. He makes impeccably independent, profoundly progressive films that enlighten and amuse.  And his heart is always in the right place, while his projects take him around the country and the world to bring back stories that need to be told.  Some criticize him for being more literary than cinematic, but in my view, over a long career he has made a number of very good films and a few superlative ones, never less than respectable and worthy of attention and reflection.  Sayles’ films are not likely to set your pulse racing or your heart to overflowing, but each makes a considered appeal to your mind and conscience. With exiguous financing and a drive to keep telling more stories, his films don’t always have the polish or dazzle that they might, but they are always knowledgeable and engaged, with fine acting from a large and diverse cast.  Here’s hoping his career is not over yet.