Memphis

The images are the real star here, as director Sutton captures the edges of Willis' story. Sutton seem intent on rooting Willis to a place and a community, and is partly successful in that. The film has the barest of narratives, as Willis seeks to overcome his writer's block. The retreat into nature and oneself is a typical motif in stories like this, but Sutton brings to it a strangeness that works well. Some of the film seems more puzzling than it should be, but I like what it's trying to do.

Just as low-stakes, but more unremarkable than Sutton's previous film Pavilion, this mostly just suffers from the over-familiarity of it's "poetic" naturalistic rural Americana style, which he knows how to do well but doesn't really offer anything we haven't already seen in work by Matthew Porterfield or Rick Alverson (let alone early David Gordon Green, or Killer of Sheep, basically the ur-text of this sort of thing). It's pleasantly "evocative" without ever trying to be much else.

Had potential but seemed like this movie sabotaged itself.

Has the everyday poetics, lived-in locations and pat, dazed philosophizing of, say, George Washington down flat. Now if only there was something but the weary blues in these heavy streets. Alas God never materializes.