Sherry Chandler

Country Boys Revisited

Back in January 2006, when Frontline first showed David Sutherland’s documentary, Country Boys, Brooks Carver sent me an e-mail in which he said, in part,

if they run that coal train through there once more I’m going to throw my shoe at the screen

Turns out he wasn’t the only one who thought there was a little bit too much train.

Last night, just sort of browsing through the stacks of books we have lying around, I picked up a copy of Appalachian Heritage from Spring 2006 and found this statement in a review of Country Boys by Tim Skeen:

My father lived in Garrett [home town to one of the "country boys"] when he was a child. He thinks Sutherland’s film was, shall I politely say, not very complimentary to the town. “For one thing,” my father said, “there are only a couple of coal trains that pass through that town a day. [From Sutherland's film] you’d think the trains were going through there all the time.”

Country Boys has come back on my radar screen because The Oxford American Southern Movie Issue has picked it as one of Thirteen Essential Southern Documentaries, Part II. Reviewer Kevin Brockmeier says:

But as the film progresses and you become more and more immersed in the stories of the people involved, something happens and all the broken things begin to change. They seem to reflect the light rather than absorb it. It is as if they have been invested again with all the promise they must have displayed in their infancy. The feeling overtakes you that the world you’ve been gazing upon is slowly piecing itself back together. It doesn’t last, this feeling. It can’t. The difficulties of life keep rising up to reclaim the story. But by the end of the movie, the erosion you see in every frame means something different than it did at the beginning. Maybe the world is broken, you think, but it’s our world, it belongs to us, and we have to love it anyway.

Tim Skeen taught two of the principles — Cody Perkins and his girlfriend Jessica Riddle — at Prestonburg Community College. In the film, you see Cody and Jessica visit the college and look over the class catalogue. Skeen found them intelligent and savvy and he had a high opinion of Jessica’s writing talent. His review in Appalachian Heritage, entitlled “Stereotypical Images Prevail,” [link is to PDF document], is not so enthusiastic about the film:

For all of his considerable effort, Sutherland’s film says more about him than the people he filmed: that he’s grateful to be an outsider, dismayed by the abandoned cars, the monstrous, coal-laden trains, the roadside advertisements for Social Security disability lawyers and Jesus. I don’t blame him. It’s complicated, and he’s not alone…

…other than an Andy Hardy Hey, let’s put on a show! mentality, I’m not sure why he came to Appalachia. In a January 1, 2006 article about the film in The New York Times, Sutherland is quoted as saying, “Everyone wants things to be all black and white, but with me everything is nuance. This film has a lot of that: you get a take on something and it can be wrong.”

Skeen, whose collection of poetry Kentucky Swami won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, might be accused of reflecting the native’s resentment of outside meddlers, as illustrated brilliantly in Appalshop’s Stranger with a Camera. At the time he wrote the review, Skeen was living in California (a fact that has no relevence whatsoever).

In our household, the problems with the film go back to those trains. Sutherland may have thought they were atmosphere. We thought they were filler. The film seemed as long and slow and draggy as those coal trains and, while our hearts ached for the boys, we weren’t as moved by the visual atmospherics and nuance as we might have been. Maybe because that “broken” the landscape is the one we live in…

Possibly related posts:

Girl from the North Country

The Road revisited

Not North/South, Suburbs/Country but Class?

Vindication Revisited

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

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