“Mudville,” Reviewed: An Atlanta Filmmaker’s Expansive D.I.Y. Family Drama
The other day, I suddenly remembered a film I’d seen and admired ten years ago, “The Arbalest,” which, as a juror at the 2016 South by Southwest festival, I’d supported for the Grand Prize. Now I wondered whether it was streaming (answer: yes) and whether its director, Adam Pinney, had made another film. A quick search revealed that he’d not only made one, called “Mudville,” but that it had premièred a few weeks before, at the Atlanta Film Festival, near his home town of Lilburn, Georgia. It’s a baseball-centric family melodrama (named after the fictitious setting of the poem “Casey at the Bat,” a classic of failure and disappointment), and an article in a local arts journal was full of enticing details about its extremely D.I.Y. production. Pinney wrote, directed, shot, recorded sound, edited, and created the score, among other things. The movie was filmed in and near the house in Lilburn that he shares with his family, and three of the central characters are played by his own family members: his wife, Amanda Pinney, and their young children, Max and Mavis.
I got in touch with Pinney, whom I’d met at SXSW, mentioning my serendipitous curiosity and hoping to see the film. He generously sent over a screener, and, I confess, little in the published descriptions, however intriguing, prepared me for what I saw. The story is simple but detailed and nuanced: a forty-seven-year-old man named Ray Patterson (played by the actor Mark Podojil, a longtime friend) is pursuing a dream of playing ball. A quarter century ago, he was a rookie with the major-league team the Atlanta Apaches (a stand-in for the real-life Braves) when, before he could play his first game, he drove under the influence and was let go. Now, while his wife, Holly, heads to work, he spends his days caring for their younger child and also dashing off to a nearby baseball field to hit off a tee, in the hope of making it to the major-league team again. (At times, his mad ambition turns his parenting downright reckless.) Ray is also an alcoholic, hiding bottles in a toilet tank, an attic, a fireplace flue, even filling a soda bottle with booze for his workout. Holly displays saintly patience but also lets him know that it will run out.
“The Arbalest” was a maximalist movie done on a minimal budget, a period piece set in the sixties and seventies, teeming with characters and imagination, decorated and dialogue-heavy and concept-stuffed. “Mudville,” by contrast, is largely a story of loneliness. Ray struggles to hide his drink, to get a drink, to get away on his own and pursue his Sisyphean labors of hammering a bucket of baseballs off a tee and then wandering through the field to collect them and start again. Yet despite the minimal setup and action the movie feels expansive and ample. The Patterson house is filled with children’s drawings, family memorabilia, tchotchkes, posters, plants, and a wide variety of domestic accoutrements, in an eye-catching spectrum of colors. The household hums with collective energy and vibrates with handiwork, intention, love. The back yard, casually unkempt and shaded by tall trees, exudes natural splendor. The route to the public park beyond is wide, and the lush green baseball field, next to woodlands, is complete with a batting cage, fences, and stands. Pinney’s avid, canny compositions put these varied appurtenances in plain view, foreground and background, making these empty outdoor spaces feel implicitly busy with civic life and labor.
Pinney’s vision in “Mudville” is no less decorative than that of his first film, but here it seems naturally so, as if here were making a documentary about an ornamented world. (He’s also credited with the production design.) Scenes of playtime on the living-room floor, or of dinner amid cheerful family chat, all feel deeply lived in and plainly observed, even as the objects of daily life, from a doorknob to a sippy cup, take on outsized dramatic power. Audiovisual elements conjure intricate inner worlds, too—a monologue in which Ray fantasizes about his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, voice-over telephone calls with an Apaches executive (voiced by Mike Brune, from “The Arbalest”), a podcast that delivers Ray’s painful baseball backstory, even a film-within-a-film—which are further revealed in several dream sequences and waking hallucinatory fantasies.
In this regard, it’s worth comparing Pinney’s work on “Mudville” to the achievements of the reigning champion of D.I.Y. filmmaking, the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo. Since 2009, Hong has been working on tiny budgets, with crews of two or three, fulfilling all the main creative and technical roles on his shoots aside from sound recording. Hong conjures potently dramatic situations, complex characters, a sense of history and societal tensions. What he doesn’t conjure is a sense of scale; his work of this period feels, at times, physically constrained, depicting places as mere backdrops or sets for his extended dialogue sequences. These limitations reflect Hong’s method: he shoots most of these films in a few weeks. Pinney, by contrast, shot “Mudville” for forty days, over a span of two and a half years, which allowed him to craft his scenes in detail, with keen forethought, despite a budget that he estimates was five hundred dollars. (He owns a camera and sound equipment.) The time that went into making the film shows up, most notably, during a break in the middle of the story that (avoiding spoilers) takes Ray’s heedless behavior to a logical extreme. Pinney’s bold and free conception of how a drama is constituted, and its inseparability from time and memory, displays a rare associative virtuosity. The action leaps ahead a year, and its central character instantly shifts: Holly puts a red metal chair on the lawn and, bringing along her diary, reads aloud from it to the absent Ray—she has told the children, she says, that he is neither dead nor coming back.
Throughout the film, and especially during the monologue, Amanda Pinney gives a calmly controlled performance that exudes a steadfast blend of tenderness and fierce responsibility. Reminiscing about their now broken family life, she speaks of Ray’s virtues and failings, his place in his family’s heart and the absences that he created even while there. It’s a monologue of fine, homespun nobility, and Pinney films it with rapturous devotion embodied in his advanced and intricate cinematic form. The sequence built from this monologue fills more than thirty minutes of screen time, and is punctuated with recent flashbacks to the family’s life together, and even an extended long-ago look at the couple’s early days. This majestic sequence delivers a lifetime’s outpouring of love’s inadequacies and frustrations, of grief and regret, of gratitude along with candid acceptance of loss, and of self-questioning that never shakes the foundations of the family—her ferocious commitment to the children.
Whatever complex or original craft goes into a D.I.Y. film, it also comes with an inherent rawness. Filmmakers working on ultra-low budgets hardly have the option of achieving the kind of seamless dramatic continuities that industrial-strength techniques can offer. Their films’ starkness has potentially overwhelming power but also risks foregrounding flaws of judgment and finish. As a result, the viewing of “Mudville,” and other such movies, feels inherently compartmentalized. Pinney’s fantasies and visual metaphors are sometimes more poignant in concept than in execution, and a theme of Ray’s crude racist impulses is baldly inserted but left undeveloped. But these minor discordances don’t matter beside Pinney’s overarching achievement: translating familiar melodrama into closeup, lived-in experience, personalizing cinematic form without any art-house preciosity. In its lack of a commercial finish, it avoids the commercial packaging of emotion; its sincerity, authenticity, and originality are a living reproach to sentimental demagogy, to the homogenized consensus of crowd-pleasers. But this daring approach comes with risks. At the moment, the film hasn’t been accepted to any other festivals, and it has no forthcoming theatrical release. ♦