movies
Growing Pains
In 2007, Dee Rees wrote and directed a short fi lm, Pariah, about a black teen in Brooklyn
struggling to come to terms with her identity as a lesbian. Rees — who interned for
Spike Lee’s 40 Acres program — went on to direct two more shorts before returning
to the compelling drama of a teenaged protagonist who, in her search for sexual
identity, shuffl es through personas like masks at a costume ball. In fl eshing out
the character of Alike and further deepening the teen’s social and domestic
milieus, Rees has fashioned Pariah into a full-length feature that is as urgent,
moving and meaningful as anything released this year.
The pitfalls of Rees’s subject matter are so vast and inertial they seem
almost insurmountable — the gravitational pull of the black/teen/poet/lesbian
complex has Afterschool Special written all over it. Pariah, however, is anything
but a pat treatment of a subject that is, ironically, both culturally misunderstood and
artistically pre-loaded with melodrama. Although Alike (Adepero Oduye) does experience
the multifarious diffi culties of coming out, she is hardly a pure victim; she is driven less by
outrage at her predicament than by confusion, pride and the universal compulsions of desire. In other
words, she is a teenager, and she wants a girlfriend.
Director Rees, thanks in part to the gorgeous cinematography of Bradford Young, lends an aura of
gritty authenticity to Alike’s environment, whether that is school, her social scene or life at home. Alike
is a good student with a gift for poetry, and her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), is fl amboyantly out
and proud. At home, Alike is constantly sparring with her nosy little sister (Sahra Mellesse), but it is
in the depiction of her parents, Arthur (Charles Parnell) and Audrey (Kim Wayans), that Rees pulls off
a minor miracle; the representation of the parental dynamic is subtle, complex and multivalent, with
forces of denial and sympathy revealed in ways that are refreshingly unpredictable (as when her father,
a cop, says with devastating weariness that he is “tired of this whole tom boy thing”).
Pariah is woven together with small, authentic moments — such as when Alike quickly changes,
superhero-like, out of her girly school clothes into butch duds — that accumulate and gain momentum,
though the momentum created is hardly a Rocky-like triumph for the Closeted Gays of America.
Rather, the movie gathers its power in the progress of daily life, with its telling details and hidden
truths. When Alike recites “I am not broken, I am free,” her words, neither open defi ance nor universal
rallying cry, are simply an affi rmation of identity, and their idiosyncratic poetry registers with a
shock of recognition. “I’m not leaving,” Alike tells her parents before she departs for Berkeley.
“I’m choosing.” — Rick Levin
Pariah opens Friday, Feb. 17, at Bijou Cinemas; info & times at bijou-cinemas.com
Eugene Goes to the Oscars
If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front cuts from dramatic media
footage, including the burning of a $12-million ski resort at Vail, Colo., and the arson
at the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture, to the streets of New
York City, where activist and ecosaboteur Daniel McGowan was living in 2005. He was
arrested in December of that year for his role in the ELF arsons that raged across the
Northwest from 1996 to 2001 and charged as a “terrorist.” The fi lm quietly makes its
point that McGowan traveled a long way, physically and philosophically, from NYC to
Oregon and arson and what drove him there.
If a Tree Falls is not an “activist fi lm” per se, though it has a distinct activist appeal.
It gives an equal amount of time to the voices of McGowan and Eugene’s own Tim Lewis,
Jim Flynn and Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC) attorney Lauren Regan as it does to
prosecutor Kirk Engdall and Eugene Police Detective Greg Harvey.
The fi lm’s clear-eyed take on the dramatic events that catalyzed the local ELF
movement — from the Eugene downtown pepper-spray incident to the WTO protests — lets
viewers make their own decisions about the environmental and social issues that led to
the arsons. The documentary draws on archival footage, and longtime Eugeneans will
recognize shots by Lewis from Warner Creek and other protests that lend a feeling of an
insider’s view. — Camilla Mortensen
If a Tree Falls is up for an Academy Award. It screens at Bijou Art Cinemas starting Feb. 17. Proceeds from
Sunday, Feb. 19, benefi t the CLDC.
2 /1 6
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EUGENE WEEKLY FEBRUARY 16, 2012 17