LAFF Review: Big Heart City

Frank (Shane Andrews) is coming back to L.A. after some time away. He looks into a job, where the supervisor Larry (Seymour Cassel) says he can have the position " ... on account of you came all this way and you ain't drunk." Frank goes to the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Rita, but she isn't there. He leaves her a note every time he steps out, but she doesn't seem to be getting them. And as Frank gets from point a to point b riding the busses and walking the sunburnt streets of Los Angeles, we have to wonder where he's going and where he's coming from. ...

Written and directed by Ben Rodkin, Big Heart City consciously evokes the 'beautiful loser' cinema of the 1970s, from the unrepentantly conflicted nature of Frank's character down to the presence of longtime John Cassavetes collaborator Cassel. Shot on 16 millimeter film -- a rarity in the digital video age -- Big Heart City not only has the grit and grain of old-school technology but the grit and grain of old-school storytelling. Frank goes to work; he goes to the track; he rehearses the stories he tells Larry, although we can't be sure if he's trying extra hard to convince Larry or convince himself. And the longer Frank waits for Rita, the more we see him bend and break under the strain of cruel hope.
There was a significant chance that Big Heart City might have descended into self-parody or, worse, become tedious; not every bum is Bukowski, and not every depressive philanderer is Leonard Cohen. But I found myself watching Big Heart City and wholly dragged into it by Shawn Andrews's performance as Frank. Frank isn't sharp and he isn't good and he isn't smart, but he knows all of that, and he still carries on. "I tell myself don't give up ... you can't give up," he murmurs in soft-spoken voiceover; later, when Frank rages and roils against the world, he's still more sad than angry, a wounded heart pumping rich blood fast.

Big Heart City also has a few moments of well-turned comedy in it; when Larry points out a prostitute he frequents to Frank, Frank's incredulous: "She's a hooker" How can you afford that?" Larry shrugs: "You make sacrifices for any relationship. ..." In another sequence, Frank essentially charms a bag of groceries out of a bored variety store clerk. And there's something magnetically repellent about Frank that Andrews brings alive even in the quietest scenes, and something sad and impassioned to Frank's inarticulate rage even at his most angry.

Big Heart City's not just an acting showcase, though; director of photography Peter J. Scalettar finds poetry and grandeur in the barren wastes of L.A. and captures the hardscrabble poetry of lives at the margins. Big Heart City may be a bit of a throwback to a decade gone by with its '70s-style feel and glamorous grittiness, but it also manages to evoke the here-and-now of the unexamined lives of unseen people. When Big Heart City ends, it's not with a bold revelation or a surprise, but with the same weary existential challenge we all face: I can't go on, I'll go on. Big Heart City isn't likely to have much of a life off the festival circuit -- it's a little too raw and reflective for the "modern art-house audience," which is currently a code phrase for "older people who want to see attractive actors do lighthearted things in pretty locations and period costume " -- but it does make me want to watch for what Rodkin does next.