Virginia Film Festival: Honeydripper (2007)

Long time reader and longer time friend Travis Bjorklund has been kind enough to grace our site with a review that apathy, poverty and general laziness have prevented me from attending to myself. Be nice and maybe he’ll come back again sometime soon, perhaps to contribute to our next little theme party. -Chuck Bowen

Director, writer, and editor John Sayles has been involved in a lot of wise, successful, lived-in films over his thirty-year career. In every one of his movies I’ve seen, whether great or merely average, Sayles takes pains to carefully put down roots in an organic, evocative setting. The great ones, like the armadillo-fried western Lone Star or the smoky baseball picture Eight Men Out, are lush with unstylized period detail and nuanced performances. For years, Sayles has told his stories with a unique and convincing American voice, which is what makes his latest film such a great surprise.

Honeydripper is set in the booze-and-cotton-fueled town of Harmony, Alabama in 1950. Danny Glover, doing a minor variation on his usual world-weary screen persona, plays Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis, and old piano player turned failing bar owner. His optimistic best friend Maceo (the great Charles Dutton, also mustering business as usual), pious and loyal wife Delilah, and caricature-of-beauty-and-modesty step-daughter China Doll complete the unlucky family of the Honeydripper Lounge. In a last-ditch effort to save the lounge, Tyrone puts his reservations about this new-fangled guitar music aside and hires the radio star Guitar Sam to headline his club on Saturday night.

Sayles’ script contrives for Tyrone to jump through every possible hoop to ensure that the audience knows that everything, (everything!) is riding on this one gig with Guitar Sam: his wife’s faith, his daughter’s future, his own life, the Honeydripper, and possibly music itself. When Guitar Sam is a no-show, Tyrone bribes the evil white sheriff to release a naive, dew-eyed vagrant (Gary Clark, Jr.) with an electric guitar, who stands-in for the radio legend at the last minute. Even a mystical, blind, seemingly all-knowing street musician (Keb’ Mo’) who inexplicably haunts the movie is betting on Tyrone’s comeuppance.

Considering the epic stakes for this concert, I was hoping Sayles would pull it all together in a sweaty, stomping orgy of blues. Instead, I was treated to a sanitary, sensible display of guitar wizardry that quietly got my feet tapping. The actors playing the Honeydripper Lounge’s choreographed patrons seemed likewise unmoved. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The climax is a piece with the rest of the film: safe and unsexy; detached.

Of course safe, unsexy, and detached could describe almost any of John Sayles’ lesser films, and even some of his better ones. In Honeydripper, however, I didn’t believe a frame of it. As Southern as a nervous grad-school production of A Streetcar Named Desire at NYU, the picture doesn’t have a shred of authenticity. I didn’t believe in the hermetically sealed hobo costumes or the pristine sets, like a Disneyland version of the segregated South, with even the dust painted-on. I didn’t believe awe-shucks Sonny’s raggedy contraption of an electric guitar, or Tyrone’s and Maceo’s studied awe at the device’s gadgetry. Finally, I didn’t believe the film’s half-cocked shots at deeper meaning: the wailing of the tent preacher, the sliding guitar of the wizened, blind streetplayer, the stagy flashbacks-cum-ham-handed foreshadowings.

It’s too bad, too, because Honeydripper has its moments: some funny dialogue, a couple hard-ass lines, good songs, and a crackerjack scene in the cotton fields. These moments take place in a vacuum though; they’re practically non sequiturs. It’s not enough. Honeydripper remains sterile and uncompelling, the polar opposite of the music it so clearly admires.

Film festival notes: This film was introduced by the writer, director, and editor of Honeydripper, John Sayles, the producer Maggie Renzi (Sayles’ longtime romantic companion), and the actor Sean Patrick Thomas, all of whom participated in a discussion about the film after its conclusion. While I enjoyed listening to them banter on, they merely reinforced what I found false about the film. The most pertinent quote was from Sayles himself:

“Many of the actors told me that [the shoot] was the first time they’d been below the Mason-Dixon line .”

The evidence of this is all over the celluloid. The rest of the crowd was all unadulterated praise, though, which made me feel like a party-pooper. -Travis Bjorklund

★★

Posted on November 2nd, 2007 in 2007, Drama, Guest Contributor |

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