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copyright ©1999-2003
DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
Buddy,
George, Vernon, Sonya and Nasia live in a small, idyllically-harmonious,
multiracial, post-industrial town that lies somewhere deep in the rural
South. It’s a long hot summer and the kids don’t have much to do: go
swimming at the town pool, explore the abandoned buildings and decaying
lots that litter their run-down town, hang out. Nasia – at twelve
years old going on thirty – breaks up with Buddy because she says he
just acts too much like a kid, running around all day like he’s eight
years old. Buddy’s crushed: she’s the only one for him, though
he’s so inept at communicating with girls that though he can say so to
his best friend, Vernon, he’s practically mute when it comes to
voicing his feelings to Nasia herself. It doesn’t matter though, as
Nasia has a new love interest, George. Quiet, serious, and eager to
succeed in life – to become someone great, maybe the president someday
– George is different from the rest of the kids in town, and not just
because he has a deformity of the skull that leaves his head vulnerable
to injury from even the tiniest impact (he walks around in a plastic
helmet for protection). It’s the usual trials and tribulations of
young adolescent love, as Buddy laments the break-up to everyone
who’ll listen, Nasia pursues a fairly oblivious George, and Vernon
reams Nasia for ditching poor lovesick Buddy, then having the gall to
flaunt her new crush in Buddy’s face. But when the kids find
themselves involved in a tragic accident, they’re forced to take a
look at who they are, what they care about, and who they want to be –
to do a little growing up.
Review
George
Washington
sometimes feels more like a mood than a story: between the slow, dreamy
soundtrack, the long, still shots of small people moving slowly through
a big landscape, and the hypnotic, languorous, gently-lilting voiceover
provided Nasia, it’s easy to get lulled into the sad-gorgeous ambience
of the place, and forget a little about the actual characters and
plotline. David Gordon Green’s debut feature film is a weird, quiet
movie that demands a certain amount of patience, especially in the
somewhat drawn-out, slow lead-up to the pivotal tragedy, when you’re
just getting to know the kids, but not yet getting a good sense of who
each of them are as individuals, beyond the vague understanding that
Buddy’s a sweet little guy, Vernon’s maybe a budding thug, Sonya’s
the world’s tiniest car thief, Nasia tends towards the haughtily
precocious, and George doesn’t say a whole lot, but always looks like
he’s thinking. Then again, it’s the tragedy that really forces them
to confront what’s important to them, and therefore really reveals
their characters to themselves as well as to us, the viewers. Before,
they’re just your usual shiftless, aimless teens occasionally playing
at being adults, cocksure and completely naïve, kind of sweet in their
innocence, somewhat annoying in their pretensions of maturity. It’s in
the aftermath, their delusions that they have a clue about life pretty
much wrecked, that the kids begin to feel distinct and quirky, real and
interesting. Sadly, the stiff line-readings of some of the child actors
sometimes get in the way of the emotional impact of key scenes – at
one point, the usually sullen, silent Sonya waxes poetic with Vernon
about how she thinks she’s just not a good person, in a monologue that
ought to be deeply moving, except for the fact that it’s so poorly
delivered that she might as well be reading a cereal-box out loud –
but for the most part, George Washington is a beautifully
evocative, meditative, lyrical look at what it means to be an adolescent
on the verge of adulthood.
—reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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