There’s a tiny whiff of the exotic about Lance Hammer’s powerful debut film Ballast — a drama set in the Mississippi Delta, with a non-professional cast — but that fact works in its favor. Otherwise, the story’s nothing we haven’t seen before, including the way it’s structured: the slow accumulation of details, then some (expected) emotional outbursts two-thirds of the way in that fill out some of the back story. But the way Hammer patiently lets the relationships between people unfold is a welcome change from the way characters are quickly sketched out in American movies.
Nonetheless, the movie — about a convenience store owner devastated by his brother’s suicide (and already I feel I’m revealing too much) — could probably have taken place anywhere, except that the ghostly blue light of a Mississippi winter plays a central role. This shade of blue colors the sky, the mud, the bare tree branches, the burnt-out trailers, and its haunted characters alike, the latter rendered immobile by their grief, the crippling burden of the rural economy, and the emotional weight of things left unsaid.
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