George Washington
(2000)
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David Gordon Green makes a stunning directorial debut with GEORGE WASHINGTON, a highly poetic drama that tells the story of the inhabitants of a small, impoverished southern American town. Focusing on a group of five adolescent friends--George (Donald Holden), Nasia (Candace Evanofski), Buddy (Curtis Cotton III), Vernon (Damian Jewan Lee), and Sonya (Rachel Handy)--Green uses the town's barren landscape to provide a bleak, yet beautiful, backdrop for their day-to-day lives. After Nasia breaks up with Buddy for George, an introverted youth with an extremely sensitive fontanel, tragedy strikes and the friends are forced to come to terms with the situation. The resulting internal struggles send each individual into a search for redemption in intensely personal, yet very different, ways. |
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Rarely has the eccentric seemed so everyday or the desolate felt so welcoming as in this remarkable tale of social deprivation and juvenile innocence. Basking in its widescreen lyricism, the story — about a small-town black boy who refuses to allow the fragility of his skull to interfere with his superheroic ambitions — unfolds at its own gentle pace. This allows debutant director David Gordon Green to concentrate on the performances of his non-professional cast, who deliver their part-improvised lines with a delightfully unforced sense of poetry. Eschewing politics in favour of an extraordinary dream-like style, this takes the rite-of-passage picture to a whole new level.