REVIEW: A Charming, and Meticulously Crafted Film
REVIEW By Jim Cornfield
August 12, 2024
Director Jay Silverman’s creative provenance harks back to his years as a celebrated still photographer in Los Angeles. It puts him in rare company indeed. Among the few filmmakers who transition from early careers as serious shooters in the world of print advertising and magazines, are names like Stanley Kubrick, Gordon Parks, and Jerry Schatzberg. Lavish, sometimes obsessive attention to making each frame of their live-action work a powerful, gallery-quality still image on its own, is characteristic of these artists, Ingmar Bergman observed that movies are essentially elaborate collections of still images, laced together. It’s no surprise that Silverman’s directorial style reflects a passion for the look of every camera placement and every frame. No surprise then that his polished new indie film, Camera, is one such visual feast--pastels and earthy, desaturated colors blend with dramatically lighted close-ups of human faces and forms, and smoky, intimate interiors. The locale is seaside, and the film’s languid panning shots of a sun-washed fishing village will practically have you breathing the smells of kelp drifts and seafoam.
Camera is set in a salty, dictionary-definition picturesque, fictional town, Jasper’s Cove, tucked between headlands on the Central California Coast. It’s sadly past its use-by date, and its waterfront is spotted with battered wharves, a few dry-docked fishing boats, and a half-shuttered row of failing dockside side storefronts. All this could be the setup for a cinematic retelling of some intricately plotted maritime tale by London or Conrad, but the story that emerges from all this meticulous production design is disarmingly more modest. It’s simply a pared-down rhapsody to nothing more or less complicated than human kindness. Seriously...that's the message, as heartwarming and cornball as such things go. And Silverman pulls it off beautifully, treading the narrow line between simpatico storytelling and Hallmark-grade sentimentality. Either way, you can count on coming away a little misty-eyed.
The story is anchored by an unlikely, but not unpredictable pair of characters, Oscar, a non-verbal 9-year-old boy (newcomer, Miguel Gabriel), and Eric, the gentle, crusty proprietor of the town’s cluttered little repair shop, (Beau Bridges in the now patented Bridges Brothers role of a bearded, iconoclastic savant). Eric is of course, preternaturally wise, a popular local fixture always ready to dole out advice along with repairing an ailing coffeemaker for the Jasperites who stream through his dusty little shop. One such visitor is Oscar, who’s only capable of communicating by means of a pencil and a little dog-eared notebook or with his silent repertoire of facial expressions. Oscar is poignantly trapped in his voiceless private domain, and outwardly beset both by school bullies and insensitive adults and a largely uncaring world, too preoccupied to bother with him. Everywhere he goes, he clings to his most prized possession, a vintage twin lens reflex film camera, with which he’s haltingly trying to learn the art of photography as at least an attempt at expressing himself. When we first encounter Oscar, the camera has suffered a shutter failure and needs repair. Enter gruff, kindly Eric.
It’s immediately clear to Eric that it’s not just the sticky shutter, but Oscar himself that’s broken, a victim of an indifferent, sometimes malicious world. His beleaguered single mother, (Jessica Parker Kennedy) a pretty widow with her sleeves rolled up and unruly strands of hair hanging in her eyes, works double shifts at the local saloon and still faces the prospect that she could lose her handicapped son to the bureaucratic maw of Child Welfare. At the same time, she tries to raise Oscar and control the wildness of her rootless younger brother who floats in and out of scraps and penny ante drug scores... Boiling up in the background of this little family is the ongoing melodrama of a greedy well-heeled real estate developer set on dismantling Jasper and what remains of its suffering fishing industry. The object is to replace it all with a sleek beach resort. Inevitably this issue becomes the flashpoint for fierce internecine clashes among the locals. Most of the warring neighbors are played by a triumph of casting--a thoroughly convincing gaggle of rumpled, hard-bitten fishermen, dockworkers, and diesel mechanics, sporting thick disorderly whaler’s beards, and each of them clearly unafraid of the opposing side.
The centerpiece of Camera’s briskly-edited subplots remains, throughout, the heartwarming journey of Oscar and Eric. The boy’s frustration with his non-verbal status in this chatty world changes, as Eric gradually shapes him into a real photographer. Shot by shot, he refines Oscar’s technique, his sense of a story happening in front of his camera, and that essential instinct shared by all good photographers--knowing when to press the shutter release. “Make every shot count” Eric whispers over Oscar’s shoulder as he lines up a picture. The satisfying transformation that ensues, the direct result of Eric’s outreach to a hurting, unfairly challenged little boy, will ultimately have repercussions among all the quarreling citizenry of Jasper’s Cove. In no way is this charming, meticulously crafted film to be missed.