X Rays of the Wayward Heart

By RICHARD CORLISS

The talk of this middle-aged couple is usually contentious; rancor stains the air of their modest North Carolina home. But when Aunt Ruth hears a tune on the radio, she softens into nostalgia. "Do you remember the first time we made love to this song?" she asks. "We were out in that field? You buried me in that grass." But Ruth can't utter a simple sentence without her husband Damascus' hearing blame in it. So he says, "Why is it that every time we start talking, you sound like you gonna cry?"

These are minor characters in the current indie film George Washington; they're also among the few adults in a movie about kids. But novice writer-director David Gordon Green doesn't consign them to the oblivion of stereotype. He respects all the creatures in his landscape, gets inside them, X-rays their souls. Then he takes pictures of them--images of a rapturous rural subtlety that recalls Terrence Malick's Badlands from 1973, two years before Green was born. By blending vernacular poetry, a pristine visual sense and a keen awareness of children's urges and fears, he has upended and ennobled that box-office staple, the troubled-teen film. From the whispers of his precocious worriers comes the shock of the new and a fresh hope for movies.

Most of the kids in George Washington are black. Some people are surprised to learn that the filmmaker is white. "They also think I'm a lot younger," Green says, "because I look 12 1/2." He's 25, and grew up outside Dallas. In 1998 he got a degree in filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts and shot his film, for nothing ($100,000), in 1999.

Rejected by both Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art's New Directors series, George Washington was a hit at the Berlin, Toronto and New York film festivals. Now Green is not just a visionary, he's a commodity. Most young "independents" begin with low-budget, character-driven studies because it's all they can afford. If their film gets Hollywood attention, they're off to direct Erin Brockovich or Finding Forrester.

Green is now at that golden fork in his career. His first test comes in May, when he is to direct a science-fiction film from someone else's script. "I've got a lot of films I want to make," he says, "and not all of them are intimate or low-cost. I know that if you get smart people and name talent attached, you can make something a little more ambitious. But there's a big part of me that wants to have ultimate, intimate control over what I'm doing. Those are stranger movies. They're going to have to cost a lot less because they're going to make a lot less."

The risk of being a movie innovator is to take the money and still keep at your own dangerous game.

--By Richard Corliss. Reported by Benjamin Nugent/New York

With reporting by Benjamin Nugent/New York