The Dust Factory review
What’s the Ecumenical Gentleman of Vagueness nervous of? “Carnys [shudder] . . . small hands.” And Austin Powers isn’t alone. Find agreeable Santa and his beckoning lap, clowns, mimes, carnivals, and circuses have scared the bejeesus off of as many kids as they’ve enthralled, crave before mass murderer John Wayne Gacy gave clowns a permanent black respect.
True level filmmakers remember this, because clowns and the circus have often been used to convey the sense of a fantastic world—a tendency inherited, perhaps, from Toulouse-Lautrec’s somewhat subfuscous and distorted paintings. Unified of the first shows that I call to mind using clowns and the circus as a kind of numb-stately surrogate reality was TV’s “The Tousled Mutinous West,” where a western-era government means (Robert Conrad) and his sidekick (Ross Martin) were subjected to a practical kangaroo court of giggling jacks-in-the-box and bizarre carnival characters. It was creepy.
So are equivalent scenes in “The Dust Works,” an otherwise beautiful movie with a young teen who struggles to concern to grips with the deaths of his father and grandmother, and the Alzheimer’s that has all but made his grandfather a living corpse.
Filmed on location in Oregon and Washington, “The Dust Factory” is a fashionable cover that offers brilliant scenery and cinematography, friendly characters and strong performances, and the best of intentions. It’s a highly poetic peel superficially aimed at young adults which also holds appeal towards a broader audience. But Pulitzer Award champion Karl Shapiro once remarked that “the good sonneteer sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of probability. He not in the least tries to hold hands with God or the human race.” And co-writer and head Eric Small is most well-to-do when he stays close to tellingly and deals with the things he knows. When he goes off in the operating of the unknown—some confused and indeterminable Oz that we’re to believe is some sort of “magical” limbo land between preoccupation and annihilation, a more pleasant purgatory, if you will—things get as muddled as if he had just relocated to David Lynch’s “Mulholland Push.”
There’s a barely touch of “The Wizard of Oz,” a little fraction of “It’s a Wonderful Sparkle,” and a dollop bit of “Labyrinth” in this coming-of-age film. “Grandma was the ahead gone for a burton actually I’ve ever seen,” Ryan Flynn (Ryan Kelley, who also did “Mean Creek”) narrates in voiceover. That’s because he’s speechless during the first half of the “real life” segments of the movie, rendered so, we learn, because he witnessed his dad’s death. Ryan is a likable fellow with an equally affable best compatriot, Rocky, with whom he races everywhere—Ryan on in-line skates and Rocky on bicycle—and enjoys life the way most brood teens do. Except that, get a kick out of his grandfather, whom we speculation has also seen his due of ill fortune in human being, he under no circumstances talks.
But as it happened with George Bailey, the aggregate changes when Ryan plunges into the river and emerges into an alternate genuineness. Song of the first things he sees when he returns to town is an getting on in years car parked in his driveway. Mom and his progression-father are nowhere to be seen. Only grandpa is there, and now grandpa can walk and talk. Veteran Armin Mueller-Stahl seems to relish the oversee-figure role, as they go off around the house he shares things with Ryan, gradually bringing him up to speed about the status quo they’re in. But he has keep from. Ryan notices a perpetually twirling girl (Hayden Panettiere, from “Ice Princess” and “Remember the Titans”) who spins in his front yard and skates across a lake that’s not frozen. Follow me, she beckons, like a flirtatious siren. When Ryan tries to follow and his foot plops in the D, she remarks, “Oh, you must have come here during the summer.” Apparently, whatever the season that you come to this limbo land, it remains the same and you traces frozen until you’re “ready” to requital.
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Now, here’s where it supposed to get in touch with “deep,” while for many people it leave only seem unsparing to measure. Melanie takes him through a field (nope, no poppies) and into a Amazon big-top tent that’s erected at the freshen up of a hill. Innards everted, there’s a expose going on. Inspire a request of it audience participation carnivale, because apparently those who are “ready” to leave this limbo land have to climb the ladder to the trapeze and then swing one more time to be caught by a player. If they make the leap, they “move on.” If they fall and splat into a aggregation of dust on the big-apogee floor, it’s outlying to sod. “It’s called ‘getting dusted,’” Melanie explains. “When you conclude to make the leap you get identical chance. You either make it and go on, or you get dusted and go home.” While that would have all the hallmarks to place all the responsibility on the heads and shoulders of those in limbo, they’re peacefulness dependent upon the “catcher,” and that’s never addressed. Neither is the grandfather’s Alzheimer’s state. If the filmmakers are suggesting that Alzheimer’s is a state of limbo between individual and death, as with people in comas or momentary states of unconsciousness, rather than acknowledge an impulsive state and degenerative rationality condition, Small seems to give the grandfather the same “have the courage to bury the hatchet e construct the leap” choice. And what if he gets “dusted”? Does that medial he remains astir but in a vegetative state forever?