Hamilton

The writer and director of Hamilton, a story about two young people with a baby, chose to include as little dialogue as possible in his Baltimore portrait. He also didn't include the introduction of new conflict into the story--he depicted peoples' lives after the problems had been introduced. Joe, the young father, is a growing boy trapped in a fatherhood predicament. The result, besides bitter silence and coldness towards his girlfriend, is a ranging body, yearning to escape. The seminal moment of the film probably comes during a walk, when Joe traipses about, smoking, and for a while, cars cannot be heard. Then, he is picked up by his mother, and we sense that he does not have a lot of freedom. The director won't give us the satisfaction of really knowing anything solid about any of the characters, which gives us some weird character pairings, like the house Joe lives in, for example. He seems to have black sisters, which is just a sort of odd thing when he's white, unless he or they were adopted. The director did not think it was important for us to know. Maybe being a foster child could help explain Joe's loneliness and seemingly constant discomfort?
The scene where this strategy of silence and plot absence works is in a scene that would have been at home inside of any type of narrative film. Joe is in his girlfriend's bed, and wakes up at 3 in the morning to play video games. The woman tries to get him to go back to bed, offering the warmth of her body. By the way Joe reacts, or doesn't react, we get the deep sense of resentment he has for the mother of his child, and we see the effect it has on the girl, who gets up to wash her face, presumably frustrated.
For all the time spent on the faces of the characters, however, there are some really stilted and boring performances. Joe, who Carl informed us is a semi-professional actor, is pretty interesting, but the girl is just toneless and expressionless, even though the camera is on her face when she's on camera, and it doesn't really move. And as Dan Kelly mentioned in class, the grandmother's speech about her flowers to the little boy was kind of creepy, and sounded as if she was reading off of cue cards as she went.
People talk more than these people talk, so the search for realism cannot explain this movie's lack of extraordinary or more melodramatic events. I appreciated the scenes where the strategy worked, such as Joe's walk, the car ride with his mother, and the walk to meet his girlfriend. Other than that, the style was much more apparent than the film's subjects, who appeared to simply be unprofessional actors, not real characters.