Film reviews: Michael Roemer retrospective explores broken family bonds, isolation, and civil-rights era
Nothing But a Man and Vengeance Is Mine reveal an overlooked American master, at The Cinematheque
Nothing But a Man
Vengeance Is Mine
Nothing But a Man screens at The Cinematheque on January 21; Vengeance Is Mine screens on January 19 and 22
FEW THINGS EQUAL the thrill of discovering an overlooked filmmaker.
Receiving a mini-retrospective at The Cinematheque this month is the work of independent American writer-director Michael Roemer, who enjoyed a brief revival in 1989 when his mob-comedy The Plot Against Harry, made but rejected 20 years earlier, was rescued from obscurity and transformed into a freak festival hit. With its de-romanticized New York locations, downbeat humour, and off-Hollywood pulse, Roemer’s film finally found its audience at the dawn of a decade of hip independent filmmaking that would follow in the ’90s.
The Plot Against Harry plays at The Cinematheque on January 21 and 23, although the program really buzzes thanks to two of Roemer’s lesser-known films. Made in Alabama during the civil rights tumult of the early ‘60s, Nothing But a Man actually surpasses Harry in the pungency of its setting, placing its characters in the bars, diners, and claustrophobic tenements of segregated Birmingham and its surrounding locales. There’s a big clue to the film’s guerrilla style when Roemer’s camera tracks its main character through a downtown street before zooming off at high speed, obviously because it’s being pointed through the window of a car.
Ivan Dixon stars as Duff, a railroad worker who marries a preacher’s daughter (played by singer-actor Abbey Lincoln), while struggling to maintain employment in the hostile South without bowing to the racism that has intimidated and neutralized his co-workers. But in contrast to dunderheaded efforts like 1964’s Black Like Me, released the same year as Roemer’s film, Nothing But a Man tames the polemics to give us a fuller picture of its characters’ lives, allowing the filmmaker to express an interest in family systems that would turn up again 20 years later. We learn that Duff has a motherless son he rarely visits (save for one heartbreaking scene) while his own absent father turns out to be a hopeless drunk shacked up with a call girl.
Dixon (who would later feature in Hogan’s Heroes and the hit movie Car Wash) lends Duff all the inner dimension that liberal cinema at the time would typically rob from its Black stories. Viewers should also look for a very young, very magnetic Yaphet Kotto in his debut film role.
The Cinematheque’s trio of movies is completed by 1984’s superb Vengeance Is Mine. Originally made for PBS, the alternate title, Haunted, is possibly more apt since Vengeance Is Mine feels like a horror film subverted into a family drama. Fittingly, it stars the wondrous Brooke Adams, fresh off of The Dead Zone and Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, along with Trish Van Devere, who had her own side hustle as a part-time scream queen in The Changeling and The Hearse.
Roemer’s motif of broken family bonds and isolation is in full bloom here. The film opens with an audaciously long close-up of Adams as she sits on a plane, cycling through her emotions while the ambient sound grows more unsettling. She plays Jo, returning to Rhode Island for an unhappy visit with her ailing, adoptive mother. While that goes painfully south, she otherwise strikes up a relationship with neighbour Donna (Van Devere) which eventually curdles when Jo starts to grasp the damage her very unstable new friend is inflicting on her young daughter, Jackie (Ari Meyers.) Jo’s protective impulses toward Jackie are sweet, but eventually her own emotional injuries are aggravated, forcing an extreme and shocking act.
Vengeance Is Mine could easily slide into ripe melodrama, but soars instead on the quality of Roemer’s writing and the film’s performances (Van Devere is magnificent at conjuring both revulsion and sympathy), along with the filmmaker’s characteristic feel for location, capturing the middle class East Coast of the ’80s in blanched-out 16mm.
It might be a small masterpiece and the most ostentatious display of the filmmaker’s maturing personality and skill. Even then, Roemer brings a certain kind of quiet wit to his artier, high concept moments. At one point, set onboard a ferry, when the child Jackie seems to be in serious peril thanks to the maddening self-involvement of the adults who surround her, including the father battling for her custody, Roemer stands his three frantic main characters in front of a sign, framed so that it’s just legible. It reads: “ADULT LIFE PRESERVERS.”
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