GEORGE WASHINGTON (2000) ***1/2

Reviewed 9/29/00

George Washington's director David Gordon Green says his influences for this film were Days of Heaven, Killer of Sheep, and Walkabout, and it shows, and that's not a bad thing. George Washington is Green's first feature and it calls forth elements from those films as well as from Green's own childhood in Texas (though the setting is rustic North Carolina) but George Washington blends them in its own unique, poetic way. The film has its flaws: it's occasionally clumsy, it tries to milk too much humor through the dissimilitude of children speaking like adults and adults speaking like children; and a couple of scenes stick out for being eccentric for eccentricity's sake. These are minor quibbles however as Green's vision as a whole is inspired and unlike anything seen in American cinema in some time. The backdrops of a man riding a motorcycle through town says more about rural America than most any dozen Hollywood films with that setting. Shots of children playing capture their natural energy and never make them seem precocious.

George Washington loosely follows young George (Donald Holden), who has a damaged skull and so frequently dons a football helmet to protect him. George becomes involved in the death of one character and the salvation of another, then incognizantly seeks both a redemption and a transcendence by actively trying to become a hero, actually donning cape and tights. He and most of his friends are black, but George has white friends too, and Green makes no commentary or assumption that there is or should be any awkwardness in that. What binds everyone in the film together much more significantly than race is class, and the title of George Washington is deliberately ironic in contrasting everything Washington the man and myth represents and what America has become (with a nod toward George Bush in that respect). George Washington is an extraordinary debut from a promising young director.