Roger Ebert

If he’d only ever been a cinematographer, Jan de Bont would have had an impressive career. Working with Paul Verhoeven, Richard Donner and Ridley Scott, the Dutch cameraman helped lens some of the most memorable action films and thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s. (Two of the best movies of that era, “Die Hard” and “The Hunt for Red October” were shot by him.) But in the early ‘90s, shortly after filming “Basic Instinct,” he made the leap to directing, his debut the now-classic “Speed.” 

De Bont followed up that commercial and critical success with 1996’s “Twister,” a fun romp involving former storm chaser Bill (Bill Paxton) reluctantly tagging along with his soon-to-be-ex-wife (and fellow storm chaser) Jo (Helen Hunt) to track down a massive tornado. Bill needs Jo to sign the divorce papers so he can move on with his life—and marry his uptight fiancée Melissa (Jami Gertz)—but she’s too obsessed with this once-in-a-lifetime storm to focus on something so menial. (Plus, spoiler alert: Bill and Jo are still secretly in love with each other.) Amidst deadly winds, these two will rekindle their romance—depending on your perspective, “Twister” is the most expensive screwball romantic comedy ever.

“Twister,” which was the first theatrical film released on DVD, was a huge hit, and now it’s coming to 4K Ultra HD disc and digital. With “Twisters” about to land in theaters, it felt like a good time to talk to de Bont, now 80, about his film. But he also wanted to discuss the action-movie climate in which he came of age as a cinematographer. “In the ‘70s and ‘80s, those movies, everything was about those one-liners,” he says disparagingly over Zoom. “It drove me crazy because none of [those one-liners] were really funny—they were just a written sentence that quite often had nothing to do with the story, and it really annoyed the hell out of me. I worked on movies like that.”

Still, de Bont was committed to ensuring his own films were fun and funny—who could forget the infamous “Twister” scene involving a flying cow? I asked him about that, and also what it was like to work with a young Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played one of Jo’s colleagues. He also had thoughts about real-life storm chasers, modern blockbusters, and what he values in an action movie.

Rewatching “Twister,” I realized we don’t often have action movies these days that are also love stories. That’s true of this film but also “Speed.” Was building a romance into the narrative important to you as a director?

Anytime you can put regular human emotions in a movie, it makes people more aware that these are real characters. I like subplots that don’t always come to the foreground, but each time that little infusion makes the characters more real. I mean, [Jo] talks nonstop about science, but it’s nice to see her really have an argument about signing the [divorce] papers—that is such a simple thing, [but it’s] so great, so human. It doesn’t have to be a grand love story, like “Titanic”—[it can be] more regular. 

When you made “Twister,” how concerned were you about the science being accurate? You didn’t stress out about that since you wanted to create a fun, escapist summer movie.

It is supposed to be fun, absolutely. But viewers have seen tornadoes on TV, so I felt that I have to make them look real. Otherwise, [it] would distract from the reality of the terror that they create—if you don’t make them real, then you don’t believe the rest. 

We worked a lot with not only storm chasers but Severe Storms Lab in Oklahoma, and they gave me so many movies and photographs of all different [storm] events. I ended up using a lot of that: If they happened for real, then they would be good for the movie. We had scientists on the set all the time—we had two storm chasers, we had two weather forecasters—for safety for the whole crew. It was nice talking to them—they became part of the crew. They knew all the lingo that exists about weather and storm-chasing.

I didn’t want to invent things—although, the cow is invented. Well, halfway-invented, because I saw a picture of [a] cow in a tree, which I thought was fake—and then they said, “No, it’s real.” I said, “Okay, we have to put it in the movie.” I started thinking, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great to see that cow flying through the air?” But I said, “Yeah, but just flying through the air, that’s kind of meaningless. If you see it from a car and you suddenly see [it] flying by, that’s much funnier because then there are people to react to it. Otherwise, if you see an abstract shot—‘Oh, cows flying’—that’s definitely not funny. You’re saying, ‘Oh, poor cow.’” Now, nobody says, “Poor cow.” They are saying, “Oh, funny cow.”

Back when “Twister” came out, storm chasers weren’t as big in the culture as they are now. What were the real-life storm chasers like that you met?

We got to understand their addiction to adrenaline and danger. But, also, those guys are weather nuts—they really photograph everything, film everything, and a lot of this stuff goes to the Severe Storms Lab. What they have fun doing, they want others to profit from it—I had no idea. 

There are a lot more of them now. I think there are tour groups now for storm chasers, which is kind of silly to do as a tourist, but they do happen. But I think it’s also that, despite all the incredible improvements they have made in depicting tornadoes, they’re still deadly and they still come every year and destroy towns, farms, and trees. Nothing has really changed. So I think the chasers will be more visible, and I think that people [in tornado areas] will be more interested in weather than they ever were before because their life depends on it. 

You didn’t grow up in a place with tornadoes. What was your first experience with a twister?

During the making, we [saw] some tornadoes, especially in pre-production, and they’re scary. They were actually more scary than I thought they would be. I always thought, “It looks so pretty, they move through the landscape…,” but when you get closer, they’re not so beautiful. And when you see the destruction, they’re really pretty bad.

You worked with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman before he was a household name, before he won an Oscar. His character Dusty is the film’s comic relief, a very different type of role than he would later play.

He was the last actor I cast. The casting director showed me some clips, but I was ready to focus on the movie [so] I really didn’t pay that much attention. [At the audition] I immediately liked how he sat in his chair when he entered the room, exactly like you see it [in the movie]. Really relaxed, laid back. [Jan de Bont imitates Hoffman’s character’s sitting style.] And I said, “That is Dusty.” The way he was dressed, the sloppy baggy pants and open shirt—I said, “Man, did he dress for the part?” I still don’t know, he never told me. It was so funny that we then ended up using that outfit for the movie—we just made duplicates of it.

He was an amazing character. He gave a lot of peace to the whole group. He’s calm, he was lighthearted. He could make a little joke about things that would smooth things out, but he also could go emotionally the other way. We started writing more scenes for him because there were not that many scenes in the movie [for him initially]. Basically, he helped to create his own role and increase it, making it a lot better.

This was your second film as a director after working as a cinematographer for years. I’m impressed by how confident you were in making blockbusters that were funny—these big movies had a light touch to them.

I absolutely knew that comedy, a lighter tone, was really important. It’s not the first time: When I was still working in Europe, in Germany, I was working on a TV series, which was basically the German version of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” I did a lot of episodes and I totally loved it. 

People cannot underestimate what a few lighter moments can mean in a movie—it’s really, really, really key. And make it entertaining because, really, movies are entertainment. How can you make it entertaining and also be good at the same time—and exciting? The combination of that is harder to achieve—you have to work hard for that. But if it works, it works.

Your films were relatively small-scale. Nowadays, blockbusters have much bigger stakes than your films did: The planet is in danger, or maybe even the galaxy. 

I wouldn’t want to make those movies. I wouldn’t be interested. By creating these lower expectations, you’re making it much more accessible for an audience. By keeping it on a smaller scale, I think an audience doesn’t have to work so hard to imagine a universe. If you make the scale so big, it loses your interest because you don’t want to invest all that time thinking about “How the hell does that happen? How does that world exist?” It’s just not worth it.

I want, honestly, to have two hours of a really good time. It’s really to be excited, to be able to smile once in a while, to get emotions out. Don’t make it so big that [it] becomes ridiculous. You don’t want the whole city to come down [in “Twister”]—would that make a better movie? Absolutely not. It’s much better to see the effect on one farm, one family, than on the whole city. It becomes immediately abstract when you do it that big. I want it to be personal. I want it to be connectable. I don’t see me doing anything different.

[Ominous announcer voice:] 

“This is a video about the 1974 motion picture ‘The Parallax View,’ featuring a discussion of the film by Matt Zoller Seitz and ‘Mr. Robot’ creator Sam Esmail, edited by Nelson Carvajal. This video analyzes the entire movie, its script, editing style, cinematography, and themes, and the genre of the paranoid thriller that it’s part of. It should be viewed after watching ‘The Parallax View,’ not before.”

“This concludes our warning. If you have accepted the terms under which this video is being presented, press play now.”

[LIGHTS DIM; VIDEO STARTS PLAYING]

Many of my favorite films have endings that most people would consider unhappy. But I don’t. To me, the only ending that makes me unhappy is the wrong ending. “The Parallax View,” the 1974 paranoid thriller starring Warren Beatty as a renegade reporter investigating the murder of a United States senator, has the right ending for the story it presents—the kind of ending that fills you with dread and despair, but might also make you laugh (bitterly, and with admiration) at its audacity. 

The beginning and middle of the film are great, too. And right around the halfway point is a montage that I consider one of the finest demonstrations of the essence of film editing since the Russians of the 1920s stitched unrelated shots together to see if it alchemized feelings and meanings the shots could not convey in isolation. 

Beatty’s character, Joe Frady, is a recovering alcoholic with anti-authoritarian tendencies. He lost his job as an investigative reporter at a Seattle newspaper and only recently got it back, but is now in danger of losing it again. It is implied, not directly stated, that part of Joe’s problem is that he’s traumatized by the events in the film’s opening sequence, the assassination of the Senator during a party in the restaurant atop the Space Needle. (It’s staged to evoke the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles six years earlier, as well as the killings of JFK, MLK, Malcolm X, and other leaders.) Everybody in the film’s potential audience was traumatized by the instability of that era. “Parallax” spoke to some of the worst of it.

This was a time when, paraphrasing one of Joe’s lines, it seemed as if every time you turned around, somebody was knocking off a leader or trying to. Two years before “The Parallax View” came out, President Richard Nixon survived two assassination attempts, one of which ended with would-be murderer Arthur Bremer wounding independent presidential candidate George Wallace. A month after “Parallax” came out, a disturbed man named Samuel Byck tried to kill Nixon by hijacking a commercial airliner and crashing it into the White House. Somehow, the authorities always concluded that the killer or would-be killer was a mentally or emotionally disturbed person who had acted alone. After a certain point, that stock conclusion began to seem both chilling and absurd. The coda to the opening murder captures ’70s skeptical ennui perfectly: A Warren Commission-like body of judges releases the results of their investigation into the senator’s murder, which concludes that the killer acted alone and “there is no evidence of any wider conspiracy; no evidence whatsoever.” 

Well, of course there’s a conspiracy. Joe doubts one at first. But then his friend Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), a TV reporter who was also at the Space Needle that day, shows up at his apartment to warn him that many witnesses to the killing have died suddenly of supposedly ordinary causes, then ends up dead herself. Joe starts digging with the reluctant approval of his editor (Hume Cronyn) and becomes convinced that the assassinations are the work of The Parallax Corporation, which he believes is a front for an operation that scouts, recruits, and trains contract killers. Joe’s plan is to convince the corporation that he’s the perfect candidate for training, then infiltrate the company and expose the truth. Things don’t go as smoothly as he’d like, partly because Joe is a hot-tempered, impulsive, chaotic person who causes an epic scene wherever he goes. But what if this makes him exactly the kind of person Parallax wants to recruit?  

The question recurs again and again at high velocity in a sequence that fans call “The Incredible Montage”—a psychological test shown to would-be Parallax recruits. While a four-minute, alternately upbeat and martial-sounding bit of music plays, Joe sits in a large chair festooned with testing equipment and watches a series of tightly edited still images interspersed with white-on-black text flashes of single words (ME, HAPPINESS, MOTHER, FATHER, GOD, COUNTRY). The same images are repeated and sometimes cropped or flipped and placed before or after the words as they repeat. 

The result is the video equivalent of a written screening test found by Joe earlier in the movie. The test poses the same questions repeatedly in different words, presumably to short-circuit the guardedness or deceptive intentions of people like Joe who are trying to perform the type of personality they think Parallax wants rather than reveal the one they actually possess. 

One of the film’s masterstrokes is rewriting the montage sequence to exclude previously scripted closeups of Joe reacting to the montage. The absence of reaction shots of Joe makes us feel as if we are Joe. We’re sitting in that chair and thinking about how the images make us feel. Maybe we’re trying to will ourselves into feeling a particular way and figure out why certain images were chosen and placed in certain spots. We’re doing our best to control whatever is happening, but we’re doomed to fail. The images move so quickly that staying intellectually detached from what you’re watching is impossible. At some point, you give in and ride the flow of the pictures and music, feeling whatever you happen to be feeling at any given second, which is the point of a test like this.

The crew of “The Parallax View” includes some of the most original film artists of that decade, including two of Pakula’s most trusted paranoid thriller collaborators, cinematographer Gordon Willis (who also shot Francis Coppola’s “The Godfather” and “The Conversation,” among other 1970s classics) and composer Michael Small; and screenwriters Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (“Batman,” “King Kong”) and David Giler (“Alien“), with uncredited, on-set rewrites by the recently departed master script doctor Robert Towne. 

The result seems like one of those miraculous productions where everything seems carefully conceived and methodically executed, even though reports of the film’s production confirm that there was a lot of drastic rewriting of both Loren Singer’s source novel and various screenplay drafts, as well as some in-the-moment creative decisions that caused great rancor on set. For instance, while shooting a scene where Beatty had to convince a bad guy that he was a dangerously violent man, Willis secretly decided to keep the star’s face in shadow to ensure the scene would work even if Beatty’s acting wasn’t good enough. Willis’ assistant later said that the ensuing behind-closed-doors conversation between Willis, Pakula, and Beatty was the closest Willis came to getting fired from a movie. The face-in-shadow takes of Beatty ended up in the movie, and they’re brilliantly right, just like everything else in the picture.

You’ve heard of a downer ending? More specifically, you’ve heard of a 1970s-style downer ending? This one has one of the downer-est endings ever. But it’s one of the greatest and most correct endings of any film. Its ruthless commitment to the truth of the film’s bleak vision of life is thrilling and cathartic. 

Watch “Parallax” once, and you’ll be mesmerized and made to think. Watch it again, and you’ll appreciate the simplicity and efficiency of the film’s construction. It’s the movie thriller as sniper rifle. 

If you read the synopsis of “Sing Sing,” you might mistake it for a movie you’ve seen before. It’s a drama starring Colman Domingo as one of a group men in serving time in prison whose participation in a theater arts program gives them something to look forward to and improves them as human beings. It ends on what a studio boss might call an “up note.” But it doesn’t move or feel like any other prison movie, or movie about theater students, that I’ve seen, and its commitment to the truth of its characters — and of life itself — is rare and precious. 

Writer-director Greg Kwedar and his script partner Clint Bentley developed the project after buying the rights to the 2005 Esquire article “The Sing Sing Follies,” by John H. Richardson. But they didn’t just shrink-wrap a true story in Hollywood cliches. They did what good journalists would do and re-reported the entire thing by interviewing people from the story as well as various participants in the Sing Sing correctional facility’s theater program. Then they cast some key roles with people who went through that same program. 

And then—the crowning touch—they kept the movie loose and airy (but never slow) and allowed scenes to play out in a way that feels real, especially in the drama club meetings. Participants are shown rehearsing scenes, talking about their meaning and construction, giving each other notes on how to perform the material, and talking about how the art informs their lives (or the reverse). The result is probably closer in feeling to work by an English “realist” director like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, letting the form of a scene or an entire sequence change according to whatever’s happening onscreen that’s most interesting and shooting it in a way that makes it feel like it’s all spontaneously happening. The film crew strives to get as nice a shot as they can without sacrificing that feeling of immediacy.

Domingo plays Divine G, one of many real people who went through the program. He was an actor and aspiring playwright in high school before his life went off the rails. He’s a devotee of theater, loves to act and read plays, and approaches it all with the quiet fervor of somebody who found religion behind bars. Some of the most memorable images in “Sing Sing’ focus on Domingo’s face in closeup as Divine G performs, thinks, or silently observes others.

The prison is a cold, cruel place full of violent men whose daily life revolves around trying not to antagonize the alpha dogs within the prison population or the guards looming over them. Discipline/punishment seems arbitrary. Cells get “tossed’ by guards in a heedless manner that seems meant more to humiliate and terrorize than find forbidden things.

The theater program is an oasis from all of that. “We’re here to be human again,” one participant says. It’s also a place where the effectiveness of art as a tool of enlightenment can be demonstrated just by showing a bunch of actors doing their thing. 

Paul Raci, who was so memorable as the hero’s mentor in “The Sound of Metal,” is a measured and understated but strong presence as the group leader who has to wrangle all of the egos assembled in front of him every week. He has an ego himself: the movie doesn’t get into the details, but it’s inferred that he writes all of the original plays performed by the group, that while he takes suggestions for what types of material to combine, it’s ultimately his show, and he has to go off and struggle with the blank page just like any other author.

There’s a bit of tension courtesy of a dynamic but edgy and sometimes combative new troupe member, Divine Eye. He’s played by Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, who went to Sing Sing for armed robbery in real life and is playing a fictionalized version of himself here. At first, it seems as if the movie is setting up a rivalry between the two Divines, possibly an “All About Eve” scenario about jealousy and treachery in a theater group. 

But here, as elsewhere, “Sing Sing” doesn’t choose a well-trod path. Divine G is a fundamentally decent person who has insecurities like anybody (the suppressed terror in the character’s eyes when he fears he’s about to be eclipsed by a newcomer is beautifully expressed). But he also has enough self-control and confidence to see beyond the immediate moment and transform a potentially ruinous situation into something beautiful just by being his best self. The burgeoning relationship between these two actors is the secret backbone of the movie, and its conclusion has the kind of understated sincerity that old movies by directors like Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder used to do so well.

“Sing Sing” is a small enough movie that it won’t be playing in every multiplex. But you should still try to see it with an audience if possible because it’s the kind of film that reaffirms what the experience is about. You can feel the collective mental hum of an audience recognizing what the movie is up to — usually a few beats after it has started down a specific path, because it’s pretty sly about what it’s doing. Sometimes the movie seems to be going off on a tangent, only to reveal itself as an element that would diminish the whole if removed. 

I learned, and rediscovered, a lot about film, theater, and the arts while watching “Sing Sing.” The more you sit with it, the more you admire everything it does and is. 

Chicago (July 11, 2024) – Entertainment industry leader and philanthropist Chaz Ebert today announced a bold initiative aimed at restoring civility in political discourse across the United States. Ebert is calling on members of Congress and all candidates seeking elected office to pledge their commitment to fostering a more respectful and empathetic dialogue among political leaders and with the American public.

Ebert is urging politicians to embrace Forgiveness, Empathy, Compassion and Kindness, the four attributes that encompass the FECK Principles outlined in her new book, It’s Time to Give a FECK: Elevating Humanity Through Forgiveness, Empathy, Compassion and Kindness. These principles serve as a framework for promoting understanding and constructive dialogue, especially amidst today’s increasing polarization, rancor, and vitriol in political discussions.

Ebert’s call to action urges leaders from both political parties to commit to civil discourse not only through the November election but as an ongoing commitment to effective governance. She specifically calls on members of Congress and all candidates seeking elected office to adopt and practice the FECK Principles.

To emphasize her point, Ebert will distribute copies of It’s Time to Give a FECK to Congressional representatives and local politicians, encouraging them to use it as a guiding framework for this initiative.

“I believe that embracing Forgiveness, Empathy, Compassion, and Kindness is essential to restoring faith in our political system,” said Chaz Ebert. “It’s urgent that our leaders adopt these principles to set a powerful example for our nation and help unify our communities. They can still advocate strongly for their positions while upholding these values, and directly contribute to a more civil and compassionate political climate.”

Ebert’s vision for this initiative aligns closely with the core messages of her book, emphasizing the relevance of the FECK Principles to the current political landscape. Detailed within the book are practical steps for embracing these principles and fostering a more civil and compassionate climate that can transform political discourse and unify communities.

To learn more about the FECK Principles, visit giveafeck.com.

For media inquiries, please contact Bonnie Rice at Elevate Communications, brice@elevatecom.com.

Order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or Books-A-Million.

About Chaz Ebert

Chaz Ebert is the CEO of Ebert Digital LLC, publisher of the preeminent movie review site RogerEbert.com; and legal adviser and TV and movie producer at Ebert Productions. For twenty-four years, she shared a life with Pulitzer Prize-winner Roger Ebert. In their work to foster empathy through cinema, they established the Ebertfest Film Festival and the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies at the University of Illinois. Chaz has passionately continued to lead all events while nurturing film critics, filmmakers, and technologists through the Roger Ebert Fellowship. She awards the Golden Thumb and Ebert Humanitarian Awards to filmmakers who exhibit an unusually compassionate view of the world.  

What is it about the sound of wind? It can be undeniably relaxing, a common setting on white noise machines. But there’s something slightly menacing about it as well. Something coming. Something moving. A storm on the horizon. A pathogen traveling through the air. 

The sound of wind rustling the grass and leaves is almost a character in “Family Portrait,” adding to a rising tension in this unique, confidently made film that very purposefully plays more like a dream than realism. Set in the days just before COVID, it’s a foreboding film, a drama that recreates the sense that something bad is going to happen or may have happened already, and the common practice of a frozen shot of a happy family doesn’t capture what’s happening around that single second of forced smiling. That might make “Family Portrait” sound like a melodrama as hundreds of filmmakers have used events like the one Kerr does here to unpack the fragile bonds between blood relatives and those who marry their way onto family trees. But this is not exactly that movie. This is a relatively happy family. Like so many were in early 2020.

Kerr’s opening shot is one of the best cinematic overtures of the year. In silence, we watch a group of seemingly well-off people moving through a field, images that recall a family gathering. It’s almost as if the camera can’t figure out who it should settle on, giving us the POV of a participant in the event while also defining the film’s fluid visual language. A character walks into a moving frame that goes too fast for her to keep up or slides over to someone else, almost like the wind is moving it. Silent at first, the sounds of the event slowly filter in as the kids play and the adults talk over one another.

After that tone-setter, Kerr settles into a large family estate where relatives have gathered for an annual event: the taking of a photograph for the year’s holiday card. Most scenes unfold with a static camera, almost as if someone placed one in the room to eavesdrop on a conversation – although that shouldn’t be construed as a criticism of Kerr’s incredibly strong eye, one that can make even these frozen shots feel more than mundane.

Eventually, a protagonist emerges in the form of Katy (Deragh Campbell), who has brought her Polish boyfriend Olek (Chris Galust) home to take the family portrait. Tension seems to emerge from the fact that he’s not included in the shot and that no one seems to have the urgency needed to take it with enough time for Katy and Olek to make their flight out. Conversations circle back to some of the international tension with talk of the death of a family member and a fascinating one about a photograph that may not be what it seems – you know, like how family photos don’t tell the whole story too.

It becomes clear that the matriarch of this clan has inexplicably disappeared. They can’t take the photo until they find Mom, but only Katy seems overly concerned. Is it because of the flight she might miss, or is something stranger going on? An extended sequence in which Katy walks the grounds and swims leads to a companion shot to that opening montage in which, soaking wet, she moves through a space where she passes other family members. Again, Kerr’s camera isn’t locked on Katy in a traditional manner, enhancing a sense of displacement and confusion – two things that would define so much of 2020.

Even at 74 minutes, “Family Portrait” sometimes feels like it would have made a stronger 20-minute short film. It’s stuck in that space where a filmmaker has too many ideas for a short but not quite enough meat on the bones for a feature. 

And yet, a mastery of tone here makes that criticism fade in memory—kind of like how we pick and choose what we remember from family gatherings. Snippets of discussions with interactions come to me when I think of annual Tallerico family reunions of my youth, and the photo that usually ended such events. If I close my eyes, I can almost hear the wind.

In 2020, photographer Luke Gilford published National Anthem, a monograph documenting the queer community in the International Gay Rodeo Association. The photographs are arresting and beautiful. Gilford grew up in the Southwest and loved rodeos as a kid. But the culture itself – macho, often homophobic – didn’t include him. He left the rodeo culture behind, until he discovered the IGRA. Gilford said in an interview with Vogue, “It was a revelation because I was, like, wow, you can exist safely in these spaces and find community and do so many of the things that I love doing – but in a queer community.” He spent a couple of years traveling through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, documenting this vibrant sub-culture within a sub-culture. Gilford’s first feature film, “National Anthem,” takes place in this community. 

Dylan (Charlie Plummer) is 21 years old but carries responsibilities far beyond his years. His mother (Robyn Lively) spends her nights drinking and bringing men home, leaving the care of Cassidy (Joey DeLeon), Dylan’s much younger brother, to Dylan. Dylan works as a day laborer. He cooks meals for Cassidy; he makes sure Cassidy does his homework, and he has conversations with him about things. He is tender with his brother, and patient. Dylan is saving up to buy an RV. Freedom. Does Dylan have friends? It doesn’t look like it. Girlfriend or boyfriend? No time. 

One day, he gets a two-week gig working at a ranch in the desert. From the back of the pickup truck transporting him there, he stares up at the words above the entry gate: House of Splendor. Within seconds Dylan realizes House of Splendor is not your ordinary ranch. He is struck by three women in billowy dresses riding horses. Everyone is working (driving tractors, feeding animals, gardening), but everyone looks happy. Dylan is captivated. He’s like Viola in Twelfth Night, who asks, “What country, friends, is this?” Pepe (Rene Rosado), the rancher who hired Dylan, puts him to work without explaining “what country” House of Splendor is. The work is hard, but the atmosphere is friendly. Dylan gets an instant-crush on one of the horse-riding women, a trans woman named Sky (Eve Lindley), who clearly feels his interest in her and encourages it. She’s welcoming. Everyone is.

The concept of “chosen family” has much resonance for people whose actual families shunned or abused them. House of Splendor, populated by queer rodeo riders of all sexual/gender identities, is a place of “chosen family.” Dylan has never been exposed to anything like this, not just different sexualities, but people who are kind and respectful to each other. These happy people live together on the ranch, eat food they grow, take care of animals, and participate in rodeos on weekends. They include Dylan in all of this.

The community seems like a utopia (or, at least, a utopia for people who never need any alone time). We don’t get to know many people in this community, beyond Sky, Pepe, and the wonderful Carrie, played by Mason Alexander Park with such warmth and intelligence it emanates off the screen. Dylan crushes on Sky; she is his first love, but Carrie is the guide, the warm mother figure (who also welcomes Cassidy to the fold on a day they all go to a county fair). All of these people, of course, have been through the trauma of non-acceptance from their families and the outside world. The political element – like Tennessee banning drag performances or the harmful legislation being passed – isn’t mentioned, but the lack of mention gives this community even more poetic resonance. These people are not just “survivors”. They are thriving. The rodeo is their world. They have created the world they want to live in. 

Gilford said in an interview, “One thing that I love about this community is that if you show up, you’re accepted. There’s something really beautiful about that. That’s what America is supposed to be.” Hence, the title. Gilford’s cinematic eye is attuned to details, and there is a documentary feel to many of the sequences, particularly the rodeo scenes. These are the real people doing the real thing. He’s also attuned to Dylan’s awakening, as is Plummer, whose face is so open and transparent the camera catches everything. The dawning of love, of “finding his people” (as Sky observes), is everywhere on his face. Gilford and cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi help us enter this world by presenting it lovingly and intimately. The big skies, the earth, the sunsets, the way people’s skin reflects the light, and the collage-like presentation of all the people who live at House of Splendor embed us in their experience. Gilford knows this world very well and it shows. 

These people participate in all the “tropes” of Western life: ranching, farming, rodeo, line-dancing. The people in this community take their cowboy hats off and place them over their hearts for the national anthem. They do this without irony or snark. This is their culture, too, whether or not the mainstream accepts them. The romance between Dylan and Sky, and the somewhat tense “love triangle” with Pepe, tends towards cliche, but, thankfully, Gilford – and the actors – fight against it. The visual language of the film is so strong, so poetic and palpable, it’s clear that “National Anthem” is not about whether Dylan and Sky will “make it” as a couple. “National Anthem” is about this shy young man “finding his people,” finding his chosen family. Whether or not he stays with them is not even important. He now knows there’s a wider world out there. There’s hope. For Dylan, and for his little brother. 

In his introduction to the National Anthem monograph, Gilford wrote: “One of the great powers of the queer rodeo is its ability to disrupt America’s tribal dichotomies that cannot contain who we really are – liberal versus conservative, urban versus rural, ‘coastal elite’ versus ‘middle America.’ It’s incredibly rare to find a community that actually embraces both ends of the spectrum.” “National Anthem” is tender and sweet, and it expresses all of these things in its visual language, allowing these sensations to be present without speaking them out loud. No one monologues the theme of the film. The theme is present in every frame. Gilford’s affection for the characters is clear. I’m happy to have met them, to have been welcomed into their world for a short time.