45365 Reviews

Several years ago, a capsule essay in The New Yorker reflected in passing on the extinction of pre-mall small-town Americana. To a large extent, this is sadly true, and the transition owes a lot to mass commercialism; witness the rampant proliferation of Wal-Mart, for example, and the degree to which it has driven out mom-and-pop stores and quiet main streets. But make no mistake: Thornton Wilder-ish towns do still exist, untouched by the ravages of time, scattered by the hundreds across Middle America -- and if you physically search, you’ll find them, sandwiched between highways and byways and populated by many lifelong residents. Sibling co-directors Bill and Turner Ross grew up in just such an environment -- the town of Sidney, OH, in the heart of the Miami River Valley, population just over 20,000. The heartfelt documentary 45365 (its title refers to the Sidney zip code) embodies their tribute to this community -- its neighborhoods, its citizens, and its way of life -- and as such, it functions as a kind of early-21st century cinematic equivalent of Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd’s pop-sociology classic Middletown from the 1920s. It would have been relatively facile, given this subject, for the Ross brothers to knock viewers out of their seats with charming details about small-town life -- for instance, picturesque streets and suburbs, and high school football fields on chilly autumn mornings. Though the movie has just enough of this to remain richly poetic (including a rapturous montage at the end, set to the Fleetwoods’ “I Only Have Eyes for You,” which also subtly reflects on the bittersweet passage of time), the lyricism isn’t always so obvious here, and that’s a great credit to the directors. The film feels understated, muted, restrained; it pulls us in by refusing to editorialize, and forcing us to draw our own conclusions about Sidney residents and their lifestyles. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the occasional moments of comic relief; for example, one scene that generates huge laughs involves a blue-collar middle-aged man complaining to a repairperson about the severance of his cable television in such a garbled Southern drawl that we can barely make out a single word. The comedy emerges objectively from the subject, not from the directors’ humorous presentation of him, and as a result, the details come across as genuine. This is one of the first documentaries in a long while to capture both the deliberate, languorous rhythms of Midwestern small-town life (much as The Straight Story did in a fictional vein), and also catch personal stories (or fragments thereof) with a remarkably acute set of eyes. The Rosses were selective about which residents to focus on, and somehow knew instinctively when to turn their cameras on, and where to point them. As a result, the subjects’ personal arcs begin to emerge on a very ragged level, and not one false moment exists in the film -- not a second where we stop and question the reality because it feels rehearsed -- presumably because the subjects felt comfortable enough with the Ross brothers to let the men into the intimacy of their own lives. To be certain, what we see is far from an unsullied, rose-colored, Mayberry-esque view of life, and that perspective demonstrates great courage. The Rosses give us Sidney as it really is, with upstanding, well-adjusted citizens and those on the fringe (a few of whom are blatant criminals) sharing the stage equally. For instance, we gain respect for a kindly patrolman who repeatedly cruises through town and expresses personal concern over generational criminality, and empathize with a campaigning judge who appears earnest and decent, at the same time that we balk at a blue-collar ex-con father’s backslide into alcoholism (and his rather shifty request to his son, on a fishing trip, that they keep the booze out of sight until they’ve passed a bridge overloaded with citizens). The movie is filled with as many of these darker moments as it is with colorful and engaging indigenous details such as the local radio station’s broadcast about the ticket costs for an upcoming chicken dinner, the group prayer of the local football team just prior to Saturday night’s big game, and the hog swimming competition at the local county fair. The result is an almost irresolvable sense of emotional conflict about how to respond to these people. These haunting tonal ambiguities, and the de facto limitations of our knowledge about the onscreen subjects -- the fact that we can identify some of the main residents by background, or occupation, or personal struggles, even if our knowledge ends there -- give us the exact same perspective, for example, that we would have after living in Sidney for six months or a year. That perspective, in turn, serves as a testament to the documentary’s overwhelming and remarkable authenticity.