CRITICAL MASS : Take it personally
Posted on Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The more you know about making movies, the more you understand that every movie is a minor miracle of collaboration; that it’s unfair to ascribe authorship to any one mind. Auteur theory is a convenient way of talking about the movies, a convention we sometimes adopt to describe and order our filmgoing experiences. It is easy to say it’s a Fellini film, or a Bette Davis movie — to do so gives us a starting point for our conversation.
So it is fair to say that War Eagle, Arkansas is Vincent Insalaco’s film, for doing so doesn’t diminish the contributions of his credited collaborators. I doubt any of them would have trouble with the characterization, for Insalaco had the idea that became the story that Graham Gordy turned into a screenplay, Robert Milazzo directed and Masanobu Takayanagi cinematographed. Will Churchill did the music.
Each of them may one day look back at the movie with a sense of pride and the satisfaction of a job well done, but it’s likely they’ll have other professional experiences that will equal or exceed their work on War Eagle.
Insalaco may make other movies as well — he says he has a story he means to write with the intention of someday turning it into a film — but it seems unlikely he’ll ever make one that matters more to him. This one is personal. And it has taken six, maybe seven years to percolate to the surface — to go from the back of his brain to a 30-by-70-foot screen.
War Eagle has been in about a dozen film festivals. This week, hundreds of Insalaco’s friends, neighbors and people he’ll never meet will see it. Some will pay $ 100 a ticket for a fundraising screening at the Peabody Little Rock hotel; others will catch it the opening night of the Little Rock Film Festival. In a year or so, there’ll be a DVD version, a digital distillation of a man’s specific dream that can be put on a shelf, added to a collection, bought, sold, rented and lent.
It’s not ironic, just a coincidence, that Insalaco was in the business for years; in 1984 he founded the company that would become Family Video. Until he sold it in 2002, he trafficked in dreams manufactured mostly in Hollywood. When he gave it up, it was the largest video store chain in Arkansas, with 50 stores in three states.
But Insalaco could never be fairly described as a video store magnate. He is one of those indefatigable personalities, a dervish who lends his time and talents to dozens of political and charitable causes. He not only knows everyone but has their home phone numbers and remembers their baby sitter’s birthday. He is a good man to have onboard, what they used to call a mover and shaker. But scratch a businessman / community leader and you might discover an artist. Insalaco always had more than a nodding acquaintance with theater; he’d met his wife — dancer Sally Riggs, who’d been on Broadway and in the original London production of Jesus Christ Superstar — while he was working on a production of Funny Girl at the Arkansas Arts Center. They were together for 32 years and had two children, and had she not died in December 2006 War Eagle might have been ready a year earlier. Sally’s death devastated Insalaco, and it was months before he could gear up again. If Insalaco regrets anything about the War Eagle experience, it’s that his beloved never saw the final cut.
ENOCH’S CHOICE War Eagle, Arkansas is probably not the movie you think it is from the external clues that are presented by its poster and any synopsis you might read, including this one. It is in some ways a tough film, drawn from life that doesn’t quite go where you feel like it should. That’s because there’s a stubbornness, an integrity to the characters that doesn’t conform to the expectations we hold for people in movies. There are problems that aren’t resolved by the end of the credits; trouble lingers in these lives, as it does in ours.
Insalaco took the friendship between his son, Vincent III, and his friend Tim Ballany, as the model for the friendship that develops between the main characters of the film. Enoch (Luke Grimes ) is a promising high school baseball player who has a debilitating speech defect. His best friend is wheelchair-bound Sam “Wheels” Macon (Dan McCabe ), a profanely witty free spirit with cerebral palsy.
They live in the small community of War Eagle in Northwest Arkansas near Fayetteville. (Insalaco had originally set the story in suburban North Little Rock, on War Eagle Court. Screenwriter Gordy transposed it to the rural setting. The film’s title evolved from simple War Eagle to War Eagle, Arkansas in part to avoid confusion with any of the movies that take the war in Iraq for their subject. ) They are not perfect young men — Wheels, in particular, is sometimes not very likable — but they are deep and genuine friends who sometimes function together almost as a whole. Wheels’ acid verbalness more than compensates for Enoch’s tongue-tied shyness; Enoch’s physical and ultimately moral strength in turn supports Wheels.
Tension begins to creep into their relationship when Enoch is presented with options to travel routes inaccessible to Wheels. First, he obtains — with considerable help from his friend — a girlfriend, Abby (Misti Traya ). Later, the prospect of college in a faraway town looms. Enoch’s baseball prowess might land him a scholarship.
Wheels can’t help but resent Enoch’s good luck, and bearing up in silence isn’t his way. But he can’t come right out and tell his friend he’s jealous of his sound body and smoldering Elvisian good looks, now can he ? Certainly not in War Eagle, Ark., where approved male activities include watching wrasslin’ on teevee and picking fights with the village lout (a small but accurate turn by Lynsee Provence who filled a similar role in Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories, a film that bears some visual resemblance to this one ).
Around this core dynamic is assembled a host of fine character actors, including Brian Dennehy as Enoch’s unforgiving grandfather Pop, who has transferred his own thwarted dreams of baseball glory to his grandson; Mare Winningham as Belle, Enoch’s ever-mediating mom; Mary Kay Place as Wheels’ hardworking, long-suffering single mother; and, in a nice textural gesture with a subtext that mightn’t be fully understood outside of Arkansas, James McDaniel as Jack, a black video-store manager who aspires to start his own church in the nearly all-white community.
If the casting sounds like a roll call of affordable professional talent — the sort of names that typically grace small-scale indie productions — there’s a reason actors like Dennehy and Place work a lot. They bring an offhand gravitas and a craftsman’s sense of pleasure to their performances. They understand the circumscribed nature of their characters’ lives, but they’re veteran enough not to telegraph any inner torment. Getting by in the world is hard enough. Shifting the drama from the suburbs to the country is a smart move in part because it throws Enoch’s quandary into a starker contrast. The War Eagle of the movie is Eden and trap, an idyllic spot that offers little in the way of cultural inducements outside an occasional trip to a Fayetteville big-box store. Enoch is right to love his town, and Wheels is right to resent it, and the answer that they arrive at is likely to leave some part of the audience dissatisfied. But it feels emotionally true. It’s not a Hollywood ending, maybe it’s not what you’d choose for yourself or your kid. But it feels like Enoch’s choice.
BORN FRIENDS Nobody has any illusions about what War Eagle, Arkansas will ultimately mean. It’s a sweet scrapbook of a friendship, passed down by an artist father to his son and his son’s best friend. It will show on film festival screens and people will like it or not, it will win an award or two and maybe there will be some kind of a deal for limited theatrical distribution and / or a DVD. People who care about the movie will likely be able to find it years from now, but it’s not going to rip a ragged hole in the zeitgeist or anything like that.
It wouldn’t be surprising if Luke Grimes goes on to be a movie star of a certain order — there’s nothing in his performance that suggests he can’t carry a major motion picture. Dan McCabe — wow, some actor. There’s a moment near the end of the film when his motorized wheelchair gives out on the freeway and he starts — well, let’s not spoil the moment. Just know that he came up with that himself, it wasn’t in the script.
What War Eagle gets right that most films about teenagers don’t is the curious blend of cockiness and total ineptitude that all kids have. In the movies, they tend to sort them into geeks and freaks, stoners and jocks. None of the kids in War Eagle is so easily classified, they feel more like the kids you see in your neighborhood than what you see on the screen.
And that part, we might attribute to Vincent Insalaco — or to the two young men who inspired the story. Even filtered through another’s consciousness, fictionalized and played out by actors, you can feel the affection and fraternal contestation — the genuine love and friction — of boys growing up together, aware of the other’s limitations and their own strengths. E-mail pmartin@arkansasonline. com
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