The best indie cinema is regional in nature, films with a strong sense of place. And the further that place is from the over-filmed Southern California or New York, the better. The rural setting of a “Winter’s Bone,” “Ulee’s Gold” or “Beasts of the Southern Wild” becomes the main character, shaping the people and events whose stories the film sets out to tell.
“The World Made Straight” is a flawed but vivid Southern Gothic melodrama set in an isolated community in the mountains of North Carolina.
And whatever shortcomings this over-boiled adaptation of a Ron Rash novel serves up, its setting overcomes them — making seemingly miscast players pay off and overwrought, theatrical characters feel right at home.
“Bloody Madison County” came by its nickname honestly. The lingering bitterness of a Civil War massacre hangs over the hills and hollers like the smokey blue rain and fog in Tim Orr’s cinematography. The trouble is, the kids, especially Travis Shelton (Jeremy Irvine), don’t know that history.
Travis is a 17-year-old drop-out who’d rather fish than work at an honest job. When he stumbles across a pot patch and steals a few plants, his pal (Haley Joel Osment) puts him in touch with Leonard, an ex-teacher and burnout played with marvelous conviction by Noah Wyle.
Leonard grew up here, but he never fit in. He may sell pot, keep dogs and tote a rifle, but his trailer is neat, filled with artifacts from the Civil War, and books.
Leonard opens Travis Shelton’s eyes to family history, his people and the bloody past that gave Madison County its reputation. Leonard has the journals of his own ancestor, a Civil War era doctor. He is the very guy to teach Travis about the Shelton Laurel Massacre, about the circular, self- sustaining nature of mountain violence, about how “time don’t pass. It’s all just layers.”
“World Made Straight” has the makings for a lean and mean revenge thriller. But N.C. native David Burris takes his time, letting the production design and David Gordon Green’s N.C.-educated cinematographer, Tim Orr, set the tone and the pace with lovely, distinct images of hazy mountains, houses where paint is barely a memory and mud-spattered late-model cars and trucks tell the hard life story of each person driving them.
So it’s a slow film, and almost painfully melodramatic in its obvious twists and turns.
But the performances are finely tuned, and the story arc and situations — aside from a few pauses for a song — quietly gripping.
Burris hasn’t created a film that’s on a par with “Shotgun Stories,” Scott Teem’s “That Evening Sun” or Green’s early films, “George Washington” or “Undertow.” But with this debut feature, he’s shown he’s another regional talent whose sense of his “World” warrants the attention of anyone bored to tears by yet another tale of the mean streets of New York or L.A.
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