Putty Hill
Director: Matthew Porterfield
Writer: Matthew Porterfield
Cast: Sky Ferreira, Cody Ray, Dustin Ray, James Siebor Jr., Zoe Vance
Part of: Real America

Plot:
In one of the poorer parts of Baltimore, family and friends come together for the funeral of a young man, Cory who died of an overdose. There are his brother (Cody Ray) and his sister (Zoe Vance), his cousin (Sky Ferreira) and her estranged father and simply his friends. But what did all of them really know about him?

Putty Hill plays nicely with its style (that often seems like a documentary and/or has an unseen interviewer butting in to ask questions directly of its charactes) but once the excitement of that stylistic approach fades, there’s nothing really left to keep the movie interesting.

The movie starts with a rather distanced filming of a paintball game. Then one of the players (Cody Ray) stops, the camera closes in on him and the interviewer asks whether it was the first time that he played. Then the conversation moves on to the topic of the funeral, but I really loved that opening. Unfortunately, it’s not enough for the rest of the film.

My problem with it was that it doesn’t really have a story to tell. We don’t get to find anything out about the dead boy, and there are so many living people around this funeral that we never get to know any of them either. More than once I was confused what the connection was to Cory when people showed up and not always was it cleared up in the course of the scene. Sometimes it’s also edited in a way that you don’t know who’s talking at the moment which doesn’t help.

The film is at its most interesting when Jenny (Sky Ferreira) fights with her father. Unfortunately that is only one short scene and other than that it is frankly boring.

Which is particularly unfortunate because Porterfield makes great use of his amateur performers and I felt that it would have been possible to tell a compelling story with them in that setting. It just wasn’t the story we got.

Summarising: too artsy for its own sake.