New on dvd: LOCAL COLOR

It is the penchant of fussy festival curators, highfalutin critics and desperate grant writers to refer to Film as Art. Rarely do movies deserve the capitalized distinction. Of course, there are significant exceptions, filmmakers whose work thoroughly explores and expands upon the constraints of the visual medium. These pictures could be labeled “progressive,” boundary-breaking experiments like David Russo‘s animation-spiked IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE or any of Jon Moritsugu‘s low-rent re-imaginings of commercial story-telling. And, there are those movies that graduate to Art status through a more “classical” approach, harnessing the beauty of elegant framing, empowering well-chosen casts and editing for the betterment of content rather than the appeasement of audiences with ADHD. See Steve McQueen‘s HUNGER or Jeremiah Zagar’s doc, IN A DREAM, for recent examples of stately masterpieces composed with standard techniques.

George Gallo is classically trained. As a teen, he studied painting with an old master and this experience serves as the auto-biographical blueprint for Gallo’s feature, LOCAL COLOR. (As a screenwriter, Gallo is best known for MIDNIGHT RUN and BAD BOYS.) In the movie, Gallo is renamed and portrayed by Trevor Morgan. Armin Mueller-Stahl is Nicoli Seroff, the kid’s crotchety tutor. As a director, Gallo’s approach could be qualified as “old-fashioned,” the same knock on the fictionalized Seroff. The wide-screen compositions are lovely, but everything else from the dialogue to the score underwhelms due to its strict representational handling. The logic of the choice is sound; it mirrors the lessons learned on screen. However, the script’s sentiment feels unearned in part, perhaps, because Gallo is so certain of the impact the encounter/s had on him that he forgets to translate it fully for the audience. This portrait of an artist as a young man tells us clouds aren’t really white but fails to show us the pinks and purples of the people below them. Instead, they are vanilla. That said, vanilla is awfully popular and if you are a fan of coming-of-age tales, LOCAL COLOR just might sate your sweet tooth. Surely, Mueller-Stahl frames his curmudgeon in such a way as to make you wish for a similar… brush with greatness.

Gallo had made four features before LOCAL COLOR (including 29TH STREET and DOUBLE TAKE), but I wish he’d turned this story over to a “progressive” filmmaker, one who could have re-envisioned Gallo’s life story… in the abstract.