Title: Bombay Beach
Director: Alma Har’el
A strikingly photographed and well constructed snapshot of American despair, and the winner of the Best Documentary prize at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, “Bombay Beach” is a searing portrait of those whom America has failed (or is in the process of doing so), complicated by the at-odds presence of an eager directorial hand on the tiller. It unfolds in an isolated, same-named town on the edge of the Salton Sea, where the prospect of an optimistic future and the upwardly mobile American dream seems as distant as the inland area’s recreation boom of the 1950s.
Metaphorically formidable, the 385-square-mile Salton Sea was formed in the early 1900s, when the Colorado River flooded the windswept California desert over a two-year period. A dam was built, water filled the endorheic basin, and the Salton Sea was born; decades later, it became a snappy vacation hot spot for Los Angelenos and others — a sort of Palm-Springs-by-the-sea, with restaurants and clubs for nightlife, and shops, a marina and speedboat races for a daytime recovery from the partying. Today, after decades of no water outflow that has helped produce an increased salinity and killed off most of the fish, the Salton Sea is merely a largely forgotten natural escape spot surrounded by a string of rundown shanty towns in one of California’s poorest counties.
In “Bombay Beach,” director Alma Har’el focuses on the lives of four different generations of residents, using them to form a putative overarching snapshot of manhood. Ex-oil rig worker Red, an octogenarian living on whiskey and seemingly little else, is a casually bigoted dispenser of armchair philosophy who resells cigarettes purchased tax-free from a nearby Indian reservation. CeeJay, a black teenager and aspiring professional football player, has taken refuge in the town with his father after the gang-related murder of his cousin. Youngest of all, meanwhile, is Benny, a medicated, bipolar-diagnosed adolescent who lives with ex-convict parents and siblings. Benny’s father is the fourth wheel here, a seemingly unemployed military washout and “Cops” casting call frontrunner who may not appear in a shirt during the entire movie.
The interviewees, and the stark qualities of their lives, are highly reminiscent of Nick Brandestini’s fellow nonfiction film “Darwin,” about a desolate town with a population of 35 at the end of a dusty road in Death Valley, California, or even Austin Lynch’s recent “Interview Project,” an interesting, Internet-presented collection of mini-biographies on a road trip through America’s backwoods and forgotten burghs. (David Gordon Green’s “George Washington” also fleetingly comes to mind; both movies locate an often unarticulated poetry in specifically adolescent underclass yearning.) Har’el, though, takes a very accommodating, nonjudgmental, fly-on-the-wall tack, eschewing weepy, direct confessionals or even structured Q&As in favor of a more naturalistic approach. This gives “Bombay Beach” a striking intimacy that outstrips many more formalized scripted dramas.
Most notably, however, the film’s three main stories (Benny’s father is shunted to the sided) are interspersed with choreographed sequences — to a couple Bob Dylan tunes, and beautiful music specifically composed for the film by Beirut frontman Zach Condon — in which the subjects dance about. While wonderfully imagined, and confirming of Har’el’s skill behind the camera, there’s something overly manipulative about these segments, built as they are for artificial uplift. They come across — particularly a fireman fantasy sequence involving Benny, which closes the picture — as inherently false and tampering, an overly subjective imposition which seems to betray the essence of the movie. For more information, visit www.BombayBeachFilm.com.
Technical: A-
Story: B
Overall: B-
Written by: Brent Simon
