Movie Review - Burning Cane

This is the feature debut from writer-director Phillip Youmans, a filmmaker from the 7th Ward of New Orleans. If you pay attention to the credits and who is in the film, one name that might jump out is Wendell Pierce (The Wire and Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan) who is taking a crack at producing films with this being his first feature as producer. Pierce is from New Orleans as well. Pierce has supported young or first-time filmmakers, propping up new talent, such as he did by starring in films like Four (2013) and One Last Thing (2018). Pierce doing this project, therefore, makes sense, as it's set in Louisiana, in a rural area west of New Orleans, exploring the plight of African-American people in a depressed and religious environment.

Another name to recognize, even before the opening credits, is Array, which is the company distributing the film. Array is the company of Ava DuVernay, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker. DuVernay has also been a supporter and promoter of independent cinema, especially those from new and emerging African-American filmmakers like Youmans. DuVernay also produced a TV series called Queen Sugar (2016), which is about African-American farmers. This film focuses on a black family connected to a small farm, not a huge commercial farm but a small home farm. Through this film, DuVernay is perhaps trying to show the struggles of black farmers on various scales, including the smallest of scales here.

Wendell Pierce stars as Joseph Tillman, a pastor at a church. We see him mostly in the context of giving very energetic and passionate sermons and then going home. There are two concerns with both those contexts. He makes some very homophobic and transphobic comments, which don't directly come through in his sermons, but they obviously inform his thinking. Secondly, when he goes home, he usually does so with a flask of liquor. He essentially drives home drunk. It's not that difficult to guess where his bigoted ideas about LGBTQ people arise, but his potential alcoholism isn't really explained or explored. It simply exists. One could assume that maybe the two are connected, but it's only speculation on my part, nothing that's connected in this film.

Youmans style of filmmaking is such that connecting dots isn't his objective. His objective appears to be simply to present the dots and allow the audience to connect them afterwards. His style is very much akin to a documentary filmmaker, which is most likely intentional. Yet, it could also be the result of budgetary reasons. Youmans uses what seems like mostly natural or available light. A lot of the scenes aren't well-lit. He embraces a lot of shadows or sheer blackness filling the frames of his film. His camera angles are curiously low. He's often looking aloft, even if it's slightly, at his characters, or his camera shots are such that mimic that of a child, peeking up or peeking through things, as if the camera is spying on adults.

Dominique McClellan co-stars as Daniel Wayne, an out of work father who is taking care of his son and the spying camera might be from the point-of-view of that son. Daniel is either depressed or just disturbed. He's first seen giving his son liquor and dancing with his son while both swallow alcohol and get drunk. His son is probably no older than 10. Daniel hangs around the house, lounging on the couch, surrounded by beer cans, while his son is right by his side. He does cook for his son. He makes scrambled eggs for his son, but other than that, he's throwing up in the toilet and is perhaps abusing his son's mother.

There is a heartbreaking scene where Daniel is on the phone and his mother, played by Karen Kaia Livers, is chewing him out. His mother has learned that Daniel has lost his job for being drunk. His mother yells at him in the scene, but the whole thing is done in one, continuous take with Daniel in the background on the phone and his son in the foreground coloring at the dining table. It's representative of the child perspective Youmans creates, and the distance between his characters, keeping things somewhat opaque in a film that already has no plot and leans more into character study.

It felt like the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018). It seems like it's just trying to give us an atmospheric experience of life for black people in the rural, American south. There isn't a plot or much of a defined narrative. It simply follows people as they exist in order to convey a flavor or cultural psyche. There have been several films over the past decade that have been experiential pieces of cinema about black people in the rural, American south, dealing with economic and psychological depression and the consequences of it. There have been films like Ballast (2008), Mississippi Damned (2009) and Dayveon (2017). This film could be included in that list, but if I were ranking them, this one would probably be at the bottom, as it never felt like it cohered totally into anything insightful.

Rated TV-MA.
Running Time; 1 hr. and 18 mins.

Available on Netflix.