Film

We’ve seen the Deep South onscreen before, in caricature (O Brother, Where Art Thou?), stridency (Mississippi Burning) and gauzy loveliness (Undertow). But boy, don’t it look blue in Lance Hammer’s subtle Ballast? Literally: Hammer’s indie, shot on the cheap in rural Mississippi during wintertime, has the denatured feel of bruised Bergman—rainy, depressed and lacking the merest hint of orangey sunlight. You might say an apocalypse has happened here, and you wouldn’t be wrong: Lawrence (Smith), a shopkeeper, shivers in the dimness of his trailer, unable to function, his twin brother a suicide in the next room.

Darius’s death, perhaps of a broken heart, sends echoes throughout the rest of Ballast, which balances its welcome strain of healing against the presence of ghosts. Lawrence, who tries to take his own life, is roused from his post-hospital stupor by a friendly neighbor who cooks him a steak, then by a gun-waving teen (Ross, extraordinary) pinned in by tense circumstances. The boy, James, is actually Lawrence’s nephew; his mother, Marlee (Riggs), is a former drug addict and hard worker who has only difficult memories of Darius. Gang activities loiter on the periphery of the movie, as do workplace indignities; front and center is desperation and real-world poverty.

So it comes as a gift, one of Ballast’s most praiseworthy, that these three characters grow together in ways that are totally unsentimental. There is virtue in industriousness: in the rituals of the store, the stocking of shelves, the keeping of hours. If anything holds Hammer’s slice of life back, it’s that the movie is just getting started when things cut to black. Young James hasn’t made his stand yet, nor have Marlee and Lawrence gotten beyond a tenable peace. But Ballast has a potential that few Sundance movies even approach.