Ballast

Director: Lance Hammer

Review by Roberto Azula

Yet another entry in the Slice of Life genre, Ballast is a good-looking, well-acted, but more or less pointless exercise in stylized filmmaking. The opening shows great promise; a young boy scatters an enormous flock of birds in a fallow field, creating a disorienting, confused tone. The film stock is seeped in a blue tint, creating a melancholy atmosphere. There is almost no dialog for the first ten minutes. The opening is cryptic and creepy. A man enters a neighbor’s house to find a non-responsive man sitting on the couch, just staring into space. The neighbor discovers a suicide in the bedroom, and so begins the gradual unfolding of what happened and why.

Ballast is a passionate film, and it’s clear that director Lance Hammer has driven his actors to give raw, unbridled performances. But there is a heavy sense of the familiar here, territory we have already covered. The young boy is getting mixed up in drugs ‘n’ thugs. Check. The young woman was involved in an unhappy marriage. Check. There is unresolved sexual tension between the young woman and her former brother-in-law. Check. The woman loses her job and nearly becomes comatose with despair. Check. Through reconciliation and some tender love and patience, the woman, her former brother-in-law, and her son start picking up the pieces. Check. There is really nothing surprising in this film, and worse still, nothing really challenging. I almost got the sense that I was being nagged and bullied into accepting the conventional morality that Hammer set out to convey.

I will give Hammer and his crew this much credit: Ballast is a beautiful film, finely shot and edited, and for a debut, it’s not shabby at all. There is a finely realized naturalism to this film that is powerful and true. But I would challenge Mr. Hammer to do something more. Surprise me. Throw me off guard. For as pretty as this portrait is, it’s a picture I’ve already seen a thousand times. It comes down to this, I’m afraid: Hammer gives you nothing in return for spending 96 minutes with people who, quite frankly, make for fairly unpleasant company.