Strummer Of Sam | Danny Glover is counting on a concert by a legendary guitarist to solve his money woes in Honeydripper.
HONEYDRIPPER
Directed by John Sayles. Starring Danny Glover, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Charles Dutton, Vondie Curtis-Hall. May 16-22. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel).
2 stars
You don’t need to do much more than scan John Sayles’ Wikipedia entry to admire him as a pioneer of the modern American independent film movement. Like Martin Scorsese and James Cameron, Sayles got his break working with exploitation-movie kingpin Roger Corman, but while he’s made a lot of money over the years as a blockbuster script doctor, he never went completely Hollywood, and continued instead to resolutely churn out one left-leaning ensemble piece after another.
I have to admit, I was tempted to begin this review by making fun of the strangely manicured eyebrows he wears in his Wikipedia mug shot, but after watching a few online interviews with the self-proclaimed “Catholic atheist,” whose parents were both of half-Irish descent, I started to feel a sense of camaraderie with the odd-looking chap. And to be fair, his eyebrows look a lot more natural in the other pictures.
And yet, for all that, something about Sayles new film Honeydripper filled me with trepidation. Maybe that was unfair. After all, I haven’t seen his last few films, Sunshine State, Silver City, and Casa de los Babys. But I couldn’t help but recall a damning comment a friend of mine recently made about him: “People are... kind of... tired of John Sayles.”
Honeydripper takes place in Alabama in 1950, where proud but broke Pine Top Purvis (Danny Glover) operates a roadhouse called The Honeydripper—meanwhile, the juke joint down the road is rapidly driving him out of business. Faced not just with financial ruin, but the prospect of losing the business around which he’s built his entire persona, he thinks he’s found a surefire solution to bail him out of his money troubles: a blockbuster one-night-only concert by the legendary New Orleans musician Guitar Sam.
But when Sam fails to arrive on the appointed night, Pine Top is forced to gamble his future on a young drifter named Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.), who’s arrived in town with a curious object in tow: a homemade electric guitar.
The film’s backdrop—that pivotal moment in musical history where the blues was just about to transform into rock ’n’ roll—is indescribably rich with dramatic possibilities, but Sayles’ characters are disappointingly flat, trapped in a creaky, old-fashioned script whose language possesses little of the idiomatic flavour of the American south. The dead air that separates each line of dialogue weighs only a little less than the slang that tumbles like bricks from their tongues.
And while the premise suggests Big Night as rewritten by August Wilson, it’s weighed down by the contrived plot device of having Sonny impersonate Guitar Sam—during the (unsuspenseful) big concert scene, it turns out (unconvincingly) that Sonny can wail so hard on his guitar that nobody cares when it turns out he’s not who he says he is. The acclaimed blues guitarist and first-time actor Keb’ Mo’ fares much better in his scenes as Possum, a blind seer who shreds nice little Robert Johnson-esque ditties on his old guitar.
There’s a certain amount of music in the lazy exchanges between Glover and Charles Dutton, who plays Pine Top’s friend and confidant Maceo, but fans of the Delta blues may be better off seeking out Honeydripper’s solid soundtrack album instead.
