J.F. Lawton’s JACKSON is exactly the kind of movie one hopes to discover at a film festival. It takes chances without being self-consciously edgy, it makes you look at at least one familiar actor in a whole new way, and most of all it ENTERTAINS. All too often we in the press cut too much slack to indie festival films, and I’m certainly guilty of that; realizing that something is a first-time project on zero budget, we’ll say that at least it was a good try. Lawton doesn’t need or deserve that excuse, having directed such movies as the above-average Christopher Lambert vehicle THE HUNTED and the cult Bill Maher comedy CANNIBAL WOMEN IN THE AVOCADO JUNGLE OF DEATH. He also wrote PRETTY WOMAN, DOA: DEAD OR ALIVE (my favorite PG-13 T&A jigglefest of the past couple years) and episodes of the Pamela Anderson TV show VIP. So he’s no rookie, but he clearly needed a creative outlet to do something without ass-kicking or silicone boobies. He has passed the test, and then some.
Two homeless guys, one white and one black, are testy buddies. When the white one, Donald (Barry Primus) manages to successfully badger a wealthy businessman (Steve Guttenberg) into giving him twenty dollars, a.k.a. a “Jackson,” he decides that he and his kinda-sorta pal Sam (Charles Robinson, who’ll always be “Mac” from TV’s NIGHT COURT to me) are going to have the best day ever. It starts with alcohol, but Donald’s plans get ever more ambitious even as Sam becomes more and more aggravated that they don’t simply go for the easy pleasures. With Donald periodically vomiting up blood and Sam suffering from war-wounds, it’s almost like a twisted version of THE BUCKET LIST if both characters were totally broke and living on the streets instead of rich and jet-setting. And I don’t mean that as in insult.
In between scenes of our protagonists, Lawton has shot sequences of other homeless characters lip-syncing to opera that is sometimes augmented with electric guitar or even rap. It’s an interestingly Brechtian touch, and may allow viewers who are not opera fans (like me) a chance to appreciate the material anew.
Though much of the banter is comedic, there’s a dark undertone that really comes to fruition later in the story, with non-stop racial tensions – Sam is mad that he is always subject to more suspicion than Donald, and opines that while black homeless people are all war veterans, the white homeless are “crazy-ass losers that went nuts.” For Robinson, this is the role of a lifetime, and he gives it everything it needs; we know he can handle the comedy, but finally allowed to pull off a multidimensional lead role, he truly rises to the occasion.
I’m not sold on every single thing Lawton does here – he frequently uses frames and filters, again in a possibly Brechtian style to emphasize the artifice, but it doesn’t always work. Sure, when the characters are in a cafeteria and mini-frames of desserts spin around, that works. But when they’re just walking down the street and random parts of the screen become sepia? I don’t get that. And some of the opera scenes are overlong. Additionally, the title doesn’t do the movie any favors. Even though the “Jackson” is the key to the movie’s plot, it’s a title so vague that it doesn’t tell a casual filmgoer anything. I realize there have already been movies with titles like DEAD PRESIDENTS and 20 BUCKS, but something that hints at the subject matter more would be more effective. JACKSON: A HOMELESS OPERA, perhaps?
But with that said, I think this is nonetheless the best homeless-guy-semi-opera-race-relations-dramedy Ever Made.
I can’t say that if I ran a studio, I’d want to pick this up, as I don’t know what its commercial prospects might be. But I will tell you, the reader, that it’s well worth seeing.
