Released: May 5th,
2010
Rated: Unrated
Studio: Tribeca Film
Starring: Jesco White, Mamie White, Sue Bob White, Kirk White
Directed by: Julien Nitzberg
Personal Bias Alert: vaguely familiar with the setting, likes docs to be cleanly edited
5 of 10
There’s
a bridge near my grandparent’s house with concrete walls and a tight turn in
the middle. My dad crashed a car into
that concrete, and at the opening our family name is spray painted bright and
clear. My father’s generation put it
there, but mine’s clearly been maintaining it.
Everyone on that side of my family live within a 20 mile radius of that
bridge. My grandfather worked in a shirt
factory that’s since shut down, and my uncles and most of my cousins work
construction. Many people would look at
them and think they were from similar ilk as the Wild and Wonderful Whites, and
to a certain extent that’s true. There’s
a shared fatalism that comes from dead-end environments, but then again, my
family copes with it much better than the Whites.
In
families like this, there always seems to be one who gets out. The Whites have Poney, who escaped to
Minnesota, and my family has my Dad. He
worked in the shirt factory long enough to buy a motorcycle and put himself
through college, where he met my mom and permanently moved from the country to
the suburbs. Hence, I grew up in a
totally different environment than that side of my family, but I’m still
familiar enough with the lifestyle to be comfortable in it. I doubt many people who sit down to review
this obscure little documentary can come at it from a place of familiarity.
Most
of the White family lives in West Virginia, the heart of Appalachia, and they
adhere to many of the coarse stereotypes that come with that region. If they’re not hustling for money (none of
them have jobs) then they’re drinking, drugging, and fighting. It’s the glorious lifestyle of the outlaw, to
live fast, die young, and have a good time doing it. Stories of the dark side of these choices
have been told ad nauseum, and The Wild
and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia follows the familiar pattern of
setting up the boisterous bravado before peeling back to show the sad reality
of the life.
Director
Julien Nitzberg previously worked with the family on a PBS documentary about
Jesco called The Dancing Outlaw. You see, the Whites have one positive legacy:
an extreme talent for mountain
dancing. It originated with Jesco’s
father, D. Ray, but it hasn’t been enough to pull any of the family out of
their stagnant situations. In fact, the
pressure of local fame seems to have made life harder for Jesco, and the entire
family suffers from a sense of entitlement.
At the same time, the
White’s lives are filled with the bad breaks that accompany a questionable
lifestyle. Nitzberg and his team
followed the Whites for a year, and even they were surprised by how many jarring
events they were able to film. The funny
thing is, the Whites readily acknowledge how rough their lives are. They’re smart people without an ounce of delusion. They know who they are and the situation that
they’re in, and that’s a large part of what’s driven them to take every escape
route possible. This would be easy to
overlook, but Nitzberg recognized it and smartly allows this interesting
character twist to shine through.
While Nitzberg
understands the Whites well, he isn’t as gifted at constructing a film. He plays his cards too early, revealing from
the beginning the sad turns that continuously haunt the family. It leaves the film with nowhere to go,
dragging itself over the same note for its entire runtime. The film’s only 88 minutes long, but after
watching it I could have sworn it was over 2 hours.
The other problem is
that the Whites never seem that fun. This
partially stems from Nitzberg going to the sad stuff too early, but I think it’s
due even more to movie’s focus. It
predominantly follows the older Whites, whose voices and bodies are worn from abuse. It makes the consequences of their lifestyle
inescapable; nobody wants to end up like them, no matter how much fun it is to
get there.
To
cap it off, there’s some clunky edits and obviously constructed shots. I have no doubt that the Whites were being
exactly who they are, and there’s certainly something fascinating about them,
but Nitzberg failed to deliver an interesting story or even a well-made film
for them to inhabit.
Other Notes:
Ø I
really liked the opening credit sequence.
It’s a great song choice.
Ø Poor
grandma. No one seems to know what she
did to deserve those kids.
Ø “The
night I stabbed him was cool.”
Ø This
film has a very clunky title.
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