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Ballast
Universal acclaim
Based on 24 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 2 votes
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by: Lance Hammer
Directed by: Lance Hammer
Release Date:
Theatrical: October 1, 2008
Running Time: 96 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Micheal J. Smith Sr., Jim Myron Ross, Tarra Riggs, and Johnny McPhail
In the cold, winter light of a rural Mississippi Delta township, a man’s suicide radically transforms three characters’ lives and throws off-balance what has long been a static arrangement among them. Marlee is a single mother struggling to scratch a living for herself and James, her 12-year-old son, who has begun to stumble under drug and violence pressures. So when the opportunity to seek safe harbor at a new home arises, she grabs it, though the property is shared by Lawrence, a man with whom Marlee has feuded bitterly since James’s birth. With circumstances thrusting them into proximity, a subtle interdependence and common purpose emerge for Marlee and Lawrence as they navigate grief, test new waters, and tentatively move forward. (Alluvial Film Company)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Variety Robert Koehler
A rock-ribbed sense of committed, personal cinema and a core belief in people being able to pull themselves out of misery supports Ballast, an extraordinary debut by editor-writer-director Lance Hammer.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Ballast strikes me as one of the few American pictures of 2008 to say what it wants to say, visually and narratively, about a specific situation and part of the country, in a way that transcends regional specifics.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Ballast inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us. I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
The final shot, of the three characters now united, may be the quietest affirmation of life I've ever seen in a movie, and one of the truest.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn't so much tell a story as develop a tone and root around a place that, despite the intimate camerawork, remains shrouded in ambiguity.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Elena Oumano
The conflicts, truths, and, ultimately, grace and dignity that bind these three together are brought to authentic life, without Hollywood-style exaggeration, through the quiet little miracles of performance that Hammer coaxes from his non-actors, especially the heartrending Riggs.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Jeremy C. Fox
What they produced is something that is true not just to this place or to these people's lives, or to the lives of poor people or black people, but to the experience of being human.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Working with non-pro actors, Hammer pulls authentic performances from the trio that are at times almost too painful to witness.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
A quintessentially American story that unmistakably echoes European art house cinema, combining the aesthetic purity of France's Robert Bresson with the social consciousness of Belgium's Dardenne brothers. It also is a powerful, character-driven melodrama that easily holds our attention from first to last.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Hammer overplays his indie hand with an abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, but his three leads are so credible that their aching, tongue-tied characters linger in the memory.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
It's a frustrating film in that its characters resolutely defy convention, and its story offers no epiphany, no one moment when everything becomes clear.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
Hammer filmed on location with local nonactors. Their lack of polish is evident -- Smith's inexpressiveness, though part of his character, is simply blank at times -- but their conviction can be just as powerful.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
This ostensibly simple film evokes whole lives in 96 minutes, and does so with sparse dialogue.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Ballast is an audacious and ambiguous debut from a filmmaker whose motives and aims are not as transparent as they seem.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
Hammer, whose blunt name belies the movie's many subtle touches, has his own distinct style. He also has an enormous trust in the audience to sort out this wounded family's miseries without the assistance of narration or even a musical score.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
What this unclassifiable story may lack in decibels, it has in emotional depth. At once a mystery, a family drama, a snapshot of children at risk, Ballast is an unusually perceptive character study more eloquent in action than in dialogue.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Plot isn't what drives the picture; instead, this is a cinematic tone poem, where the dominant mood is a Faulknerian mix of sorrow and endurance.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan
The overall thrust of the story -- that downtrodden folks in desperate circumstances have the capacity for goodness -- is one too rarely seen.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Mike Mayo
Ballast, though, is less than completely satisfying in a dramatic sense. Events that seem to be important are dropped and left unresolved. Conflicts from the past are mentioned but never explained, as if key scenes were missing. Given that disinterest in conventional narrative techniques, the abrupt ending may be appropriate, but it feels wrong and arbitrary.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
Hammer has a nice eye, and his premise develops engagingly in the final half hour, as he raises provocative questions about whether one man can truly step in for another.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Ballast lacks ballast. Much praised by aficionados of minimalist indie cinema – hey, who needs a plot when you've got mood? – it's a wearying slog through anomie in a Mississippi Delta township.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
