Hamilton Reviews

First-time writer-director Matthew Porterfield's small-scale, 16mm slice-of-life drama has the hazy, sticky rhythms of a hot summer day and the minimal narrative of a classic European art film. Asbury Park native Lena (Stephanie Vizzi), 17 and a new mother, is spending the summer with her boyfriend Joe's (Chris Myers) family in Hamilton, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in northeastern Baltimore. The slightly older Joe has moved out and is renting an apartment nearby, working odd jobs to help support the baby. Lena, however, would prefer less money and more contact with Joe, both for herself and for baby Adelaide. Joe's family is solidly behind Lena, who works part-time in a local bakery and is leaving the next day to spend August with Joe's grandparents on the Maryland shore. The inarticulate Joe, in turn, is torn between clinging to freedom to and committing to fatherhood. Over the course of 36 sticky hours, Lena and Joe drift through the neighborhood, Lena chatting with friends and family and enlisting their help in approaching Joe, and Joe retreating into video games, practicing guitar and hanging out. A Baltimore native and NYU-film-school dropout, Porterfield improvised his film with local actors and nonprofessionals; while it's been compared to David Gordon Green's equally noncommercial GEORGE WASHINGTON (2000), with which it shares sleepy rhythms and blue-collar, multiethnic small-town settings, it's a far more organic piece of work. Porterfield and his cast capture the halting eloquence of everyday gestures and plain speech set against a backdrop of natural sounds: the deafening chatter of cicadas and crickets, the lapping of water in ponds and backyard pools, cooing mourning doves and humming traffic. That Lena and Joe are too young and immature to be parents is self-evident, but that's not the story Porterfield is telling. The fact is, they are parents, and while the quietly serious Lena has accepted the fact that she's now first and foremost Adelaide's mother, Joe is balking. The film ends on the bittersweet image of Lena and Joe's family in the car, en route to the shore, crosscut with Joe on his bike, clutching a small bunch of flowers. There's hope there, mixed with a piercing awareness that wrong turns and missed connections will always be part of Joe and Lena's relationship, and that the best intentions may not be enough to overcome the obstacles they face.