 "Photo: Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.")
Choosing to make your first film about Humboldt County, a place hidden to most people-a county that seems to be both ancestral and progressive-automatically creates the risk of alienating many viewers.
But filmmakers Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs got lucky. Their film "Humboldt County" premiered at the Eureka Theater during the opening night of theWild Rivers 101 Film Festival on Aug. 27. As they mentioned in a Q&A session after the film, the film's popularity amongst the masses at the South by Southwest Music and Film Festival in Austin, Texas, allowed the film to be picked up by distributor Magnolia Pictures, securing a nationwide release for their passion project. With glowing smiles, they also mentioned that the second screening of their film bumped a screening of "Juno" so that it could be moved into a larger theater. Even with the bump, they had to turn away about 100 people.
"Humboldt County" revolves around Peter (Jeremy Strong), a medical student in Los Angeles and Bogart (Fairuza Balk), a drifter and a bit of a sexual deviant. They travel from Los Angeles to the Southern Humboldt town of Redway, Calif., after Peter's professor fails him during his final class.
Once in town, Bogart disappears without a trace. We're told that she disappears from time to time. Abandoned in Redway, Peter is left to flounder with a family of hippies who smoke and grow pot for different reasons. For the father, it's to help him finish his book. In the case of the son, he grows and sells to financially support and raise his daughter, Charity.
Through the next couple of days, Peter unwinds from the frantic pace of life in Los Angeles to the slow and loping gait of life in Humboldt County. He experiences an unexpected change in his demeanor - much like Zach Braff's character in "Garden State" in that the longer he stays, the more 'okay' with life he becomes. Everybody expects you to always be doing something or going somewhere - and Peter slowly realizes what he's been missing by living this life. He hasn't had the chance to sit idly by and contemplate what he really wants out of life. Coming to Redway was his first chance at doing such a thing.
The film shifts from an ironic comedy towards more serious matters when it is needed to rush through the rest of the film. Halfway through, the film picks up and begins to run at its ending with vigor. The film picks up the pace about two-thirds of the way through, because a movie this slow would run over 160 minutes. For a small film, that's never a very good idea. If your first film runs over the 90-minute benchmark, it's both more expensive and possibly egotistical in the way that you think that your first idea is so great that it deserves two hours. However, if the film had braved such fiscal waters, continuing its tone without abruptly shifting it would have been much more rewarding. Grodsky and Jacobs mentioned the many deleted scenes that would be featured on the DVD.
As the film currently stands, it did nothing for me. The passion of the filmmakers is visible but, in the end, "Humboldt County" wasn't very enjoyable. It perpetuated the stereotypes of our county-that we are pot growers and pot smokers and off-the-deep-end leftists. It went for the broad and general stereotypes and told the story through the eyes of someone seeing exactly what one would expect to see here.
In "Humboldt County," no one lives up here without having a connection to marijuana which is simply ridiculous because there are many who live in the area who do not have any affiliation with the substance. The film's broad-based swipes at our area could be demeaning to those who live here and aren't so progressive or entrenched in the weed culture.
Instead of expanding on those who live average, drug-free lives with electricity and plumbing, "Humboldt County" simply veers into hyperbolic territory to attain cheap laughs which leaves it as a film that had potential to become something greater and more interesting than it was, but ended up falling short. If you liked the aforementioned Garden State with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman, then you will most likely enjoy "Humboldt County" - or at least the first 70 minutes.
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The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Lumberjack Newspaper.
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