Critical Mass

Stray Dog gets the interior right

Ronnie “Stray Dog” Hall and his Mexican-born wife, Alicia, take a ride in Debra Granik’s documentary Stray Dog.
Ronnie “Stray Dog” Hall and his Mexican-born wife, Alicia, take a ride in Debra Granik’s documentary Stray Dog.

If you didn't see it at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (which wraps up tonight -- see hsdfi.org for details), it's difficult to say whether most of you will get a chance to see Debra Granik's stunning cinema verite documentary, Stray Dog, in theaters.

While it's one of the finest films I've seen this year, there's no guarantee that it will be widely distributed. But these days, it is not so hard to see a movie that you really want to see. It is likely that within a year or so you'll be able to view it in your home, via DVD or Netflix or some cable network. (You can go to straydogthemovie.com for updates and to see clips and outtakes.)

There is a scene in the movie's third act where a young Mexican emigre living in a rural community near Branson calls the girlfriend he left behind. He misses her, he longs for her, and the America he found is not what he expected. He thought there would be a town, something like a city. Instead, he has come to a place that is "almost all highways."

That is as good a description of our country as I've heard lately, for most of the interior of the United States is precisely that: emptiness veined with asphalt and concrete, with occasional towns and cities. America is large; most of its people live near its coasts. If the predominant images of the country you receive are from movies and TV, it's not hard to see why a foreigner might imagine America as a megalopolis that embodies the characters of New York, Miami and San Francisco (while looking vaguely like Toronto).

But anyone who lives in Arkansas understands that things look different at ground level; flyover territory is not a patchwork of bucolic farms and tidy Pleasantvilles. There are no simple folk, no uncomplicated men.

Ronnie Hall, the prime subject of Stray Dog, is one of those complicated Americans. He is a Vietnam veteran cum biker who makes a living running a small trailer/RV park in a community near Branson called At Ease. Hall looks like a movie biker. Granik came to know him when he auditioned for (and won) the role of Thump Milton, a backwoods crime boss -- a tribal figure -- in Granik's 2010 feature Winter's Bone. (In the film, Hall memorably tells Jennifer Lawrence's character, "You got something to say, child, you best say it now.") He is a burly, bearded man who, in the film, hints at a troubled, violent past. He did unspeakable things in Vietnam. He has hurt people since. But in recent years he has worked to reform himself, and the film portrays him as a more than decent figure. The Ronnie "Stray Dog" Hall that Granik captures is a working-class Buddha more concerned with honor and duty than any sort of material success. He helps people. He is kindly to those who can't pay the meager rent he charges; he arranges dentist visits and fixes rotted floors.

Hall has a new wife, and for the first time in years he's not living a solitary life. They have a comfortable enough trailer and, though his truck appears to be a few years old, it's in good shape and well-appointed. He has Wi-Fi and a laptop and four small dogs he treats with exceeding tenderness.

His sparkling Harley is a point of pride. He seems almost like a super patriot, involved with local veterans' groups, part of the POW/MIA activist community. But after he returned home from his second tour of duty in Vietnam, he felt so unwelcome that he left the country and lived for years in South Korea, where he felt appreciated. Now he allows that the U.S. government "makes him sick" to the point that he has considered moving to Mexico, which reminds him of how small-town America was in the '50s.

This is ironic, for his Mexican-born wife, Alicia, has recently gained U.S. citizenship. She's learning English, he's learning Spanish, and they communicate with each other in a totally adorable version of Spanglish. Additionally, Stray Dog's third act is largely about how she and Ronnie bring her twin sons -- 19-year-old Jesus and Angel (the aforementioned lonely heart) -- from Mexico to Missouri, and how the boys begin to acclimate to a very different culture. After they arrive, they are introduced to a relatively new resident of Ronnie's trailer park, a man who we understand has been living in his vehicle for the past 12 years.

"Where in Mexico are you from? " the man asks.

"Mexico City," the boys reply.

The man shakes his head in sympathy. He tells the twins he imagines they must be very happy to get out of that hellhole. They duck their heads to be polite, but it's not difficult to see how ambivalent they are about their new home. We see them carrying American flags at the funeral of a soldier killed in Afghanistan and singing along with a website language lesson version of "God Bless America" ("now you will be able to sing like any North American," the text on the website promises, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Mexico is in North America), but the sweetheart is back in Mexico.

...

One of the movies that Stray Dog reminds me of is Easy Rider, the Dennis Hopper-directed indie from 1969 that explores the end of the hippie dream as the '60s gave way to the '70s. It stars Peter Fonda as a biker named Wyatt whose nickname -- "Captain America" -- derives from his chopped Harley-Davidson with its red, white and blue gas tank.

In Stray Dog, Hall rides a Harley with a similar color scheme, and like Easy Rider's Wyatt and Billy (Hopper), Ronnie and Alicia embark on a cross-country road trip. Billy and Wyatt are smuggling drugs from Los Angeles to New Orleans and plan to retire rich in Florida. Ronnie and Alicia are going to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington for the annual "Run for the Wall" pilgrimage.

Right near the end of Easy Rider, when an elated Billy expresses congratulations on a successful mission, Wyatt cryptically tells him: "We blew it." Is he talking about generational aspirations of transcending material aspirations or about the curdling of the American dream? Both? Neither?

In any case, Stray Dog, with its visual quotations from Easy Rider and its deep ambivalence about an America that might have blown it, is a tonal sequel to the earlier film, a nonfiction echo of Hopper's masterpiece. While the actual Ronnie Hall is a very different protagonist than the mysterious Wyatt (the son of a sharecropper, Ronnie went to Vietnam; despite his disaffection with America, he eventually returned home to settle near the rest of his family), he's also an outsider, if not quite an outlaw.

Wyatt gets off easy. At the end of Easy Rider, a redneck blows him off his bike with a shotgun blast. The film ends with a literal blaze of glory.

But while Wyatt is a construct -- the embodiment of a certain kind of counter-cultural California cool -- Ronnie is a very real man, with night terrors brought on by guilty dreams. He did things when he was a kid that he has never been able to root out with therapy, though he keeps trying -- both with talking cures and what he calls "wind therapy," taking to the open road on his Harley. He can't forget and he doesn't want to forgive himself, for to do so would "dishonor" the comrades he left behind in Southeast Asia.

But he means to live, as well as he can, in a compromised land that's almost all highways.

...

Maybe the most remarkable thing about Stray Dog is how it allows Ronnie and its other subjects immense dignity without romanticizing them. A lot of the people who approached Ronnie at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival last weekend might have crossed the street to avoid him if they'd seen him in other circumstances, if they hadn't just spent 100 minutes or so in his company. One of the great things that movies can do is engender empathy in people for others who seem very different from them.

It is tempting to say that Stray Dog offers us a glimpse of some truer sort of America than the brand generally promulgated via mass media, but maybe it's more honest to acknowledge that there are lots of "true Americas" and that most of us live in several of them. One of the reasons Granik's Winter's Bone feels so real is that it makes use of real people and real places -- that the poverty and the consumerist junk (someone, I can't remember who, described the film as looking as though a Wal-Mart had exploded) are authentic.

The movies generally privilege a different demographic; they generate aspirational images -- like the mini-mansion the going-broke Amy and Nick inhabit in Gone Girl.

Had we more space, we could talk about the interesting points of confluence between these two Missouri-set movies: While Gone Girl is the furthermost thing from a documentary -- it's a crazy fiction that purposefully bears no resemblance to anything "real" -- they both explore an America that badly blew it. Both movies are about bait-and-switch cons.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Style on 10/19/2014

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