Two years before American independent film aficionados developed a consuming and inevitably fleeting crush on rural Missouri at the Sundance premiere of Winter's Bone, the St. Louis International Film Festival screened an unassuming feature called Sinner Come Home as a part of its 2008 programming. The third micro-budget feature film from northwestern Missouri-based director, writer, and editor Blake Eckard, Sinner presented a novel stripe of Biblically-tinged melodrama amid the slouching houses, sticky dive bars, and lonely county roads of the film-maker's native landscape. The film's searingly entropic tone, effortless authenticity, and palpable sensitivity to the emotional and moral mires of small-town life marked Sinner Come Home as a worthy landmark in Missouri's cinematic topography, and Eckard as a vital independent artistic voice in the region.
That voice returns to the Stella Artois St. Louis International Festival this week with a bloody-minded new feature film, Bubba Moon Face, which both Eckard and co-star Joe Hammerstone will be on hand to present. Grimier, fiercer, and more ambiguous than Sinner Come Home, Eckard's latest film nonetheless affirms the director's singular approach to narrative cinema. In the case of Bubba Moon Face, that approach takes up the sharp-eyed, gritty verisimilitude that normally attends realist portraiture, and employs it in the service of a discomfiting, rotten tale of cruelty and moral disorder.
On the occasion of his mother's death, Horton (Tyler Messner) reluctantly returns to the dismal Missouri town he abandoned years ago. Penniless and burdened with a broken-down car, he finds a space on the couch of his little brother, Stanton (Joe Hammerstone), whose occupies himself with carpentry and hound-dog breeding in between12-packs of Busch Light. In short order, Horton finds himself drawn into all the implacable seediness that he once left behind. The chain-smoking, abrasive Sabetha (Sylvia Geiger) appears, resentfully lugging a baby girl she claims is Stanton's. She is followed by the brothers' loathsome, manipulative father, Gus (Joe Hanrahan), a meth-addled toad of a man whose very presence sets Horton's fury simmering. Meanwhile, Horton circles a trick-turning, hollow-eyed bartender, Leslie (Misty Ballew), in a questionable effort to rekindle their prior, underage fumblings.
Bubba Moon Face hews closely to Horton's perspective throughout its brisk 85-minute running time, but the film refuses categorization as a character study. Eckard shutters Messner behind a careless haircut, shaggy mustache, and child molester spectacles, effectively obscuring his performer from detailed emotional examination. The script offers scant peeks into Horton's self-conception, which seems defined not by ambitions but rancor. He gazes with squinting pensiveness at the cold farmland and muddy streams that encircle him, betraying only a vague distaste for everything and everyone he sees. Eckard commendably refrains from glossing Horton's rather repulsive flaws, first suggesting and then starkly illustrating his inclination to explosive violence. The glimpses the film provides into Horton's moral life are hazy. The stray tinglings of the man's conscience find expression almost exclusively through his actions, which coalesce—as much to his surprise as anyone's--around his neglected little niece, offhandedly nicknamed Bubba.
There are no lonely, good-hearted souls amid the film's squalor. No character fills the role of sweet, guileless Jan in Sinner Come Home, who at least offered her husband the promise of a shaky redemption by that film's end. Not surprisingly, Bubba Moon Face proves to be a much more pitiless and harrowing tale, down to a conclusion that manages to be appalling and also the least awful resolution to an abominable situation. Needless to say, the film's unremitting displays of human ugliness may repel viewers whose taste for the luridly miserable is limited. Nonetheless, Eckard's distinctive melding of dingy realism and florid melodrama makes Bubba Moon Face an fascinating work, and makes it easy to forgive the shoestring-budget seams in its performances, editing, and aesthetic. Ultimately, however, what most impresses about Eckard's film is its conveyance of an unabashedly grotesque story without the sneering condescension and rural exoticism that so often bedevil American indie films with budgets a hundred times larger. That, more than anything, is what makes dauntless independent regional film voices such as Eckard's so important: They bluntly reveal the artistic and intellectual paucity of the contemporary cinematic landscape.
Bubba Moon Face plays at the Tivoli Theatre (6350 Delmar) Saturday, November 12 at 11 a.m. Tickets are $12, $10 for Cinema St. Louis Members. For advance tickets, call 314-725-6555, ext. 0, or visit cinemastlouis.org. St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series.
