Rich Hill (2014)
-Watched on Netflix in my makeshift bedroom aka Grandma’s storage room-
Last year I was driving back home to Milwaukee with a friend from the incredible True/False Film Fest in Missouri. As we drove through the green Missouri countryside, we dreamed of Plan Z, where we would settle down in one of the small towns along the road. I would run an antique store and he would work in a garage, and we would have 5+ kids and hang out on a porch swing every night drinking cheap beer til the sun rises. This idyllic/miserable fabrication was both squashed and reinforced when watching Rich Hill.
Rich Hill is a beautiful portrait of the lives of 3 teenage boys and their families in small town Missouri. The immense poverty and lack of education shown in this film is despicable coming from a first world country. Yeehaw, America. Despite this, I appreciated the film portraying a contemporary social issue without being an in-your-face educational doc. Junk food meals, knife collecting and children smoking cigarettes with their parents were a few of the uncomfortable images caught with touching intimacy. There’s always a hesitant struggle when you are enjoying looking at something troubling. These boys are dealing with difficulties that most of us have a hard time relating to, and still hold a sweetness at their core that keeps them going. They dream of bigger and better things in their future and you want so badly for those dreams to come true but are overwhelmed with the fact that they probably won’t, and it’s devastating.
While writing this, it has been difficult to avoid sounding condescending or sympathetic. I genuinely have the upmost respect for these kids. I remember seeing one of the boys at the San Francisco International Film Fest (before seeing the film) and now wonder what that experience must have been like for him. Being in such a massive, wealthy city like SF, and having a theatre of people watching your life in their nice clothes and designer bags and then asking you questions about your life. Was it glamorous/exciting/hard/sad? I also wonder if this film has made them more self-conscious of their lives and perhaps even made them feel bad about, or for themselves in a way they hadn’t before?