‘Belfast, Maine’: A Small Town Under the Microscope
By Stephen Holden
To call "Belfast, Maine," Frederick Wiseman's spellbinding documentary portrait of a small New England coastal town, a romantic movie might be overstating the mood evoked by this stately four-hour film, which bursts with glowing images of fall foliage, autumn sunsets and Halloween decorations. Yet when you come away from the movie (the director's 30th), which Friday opens the Film Society of Lincoln Center's monthlong survey of Wiseman's career and is to be shown on PBS next Friday [February 4], there is no escaping a sense that in many ways that Belfast represents his passionately elegiac vision of an American community that works.
It's not that there is anything especially glamorous about this blue-collar town of 6,000, beyond its picture-postcard landscape and streets lined with handsome clapboard houses. Although the movie has one scene of a high-school class and another of youthful skateboarders, most of the lives it examines are middle-aged and beyond. While some are obviously better off than others, there are no glaring class differences. The closest thing to a mansion on the hill is the large credit card company that is the town's chief employer.
But the visit that the film pays to that company's offices, where we observe clerks doing telemarketing from their immaculate cubicles, is surprisingly brief. For what "Belfast, Maine" really wants to do is capture a deeper, more timeless sense of the town as a hardy organism more closely tied to nature than many other more affluent American communities.
Its flourishing credit card company notwithstanding, what seems to hold Belfast together is more spiritual than economic and has to do with the town's austere 1940s and '50s-like culture, economy and way of life.
It is a place whose churchgoing citizens feel a responsibility to care for their own and a town conscious of its history. (In one scene a lecturer remembers Belfast's contribution to the Civil War.) And by cherishing its past, the film implies, Belfast is able in many ways to live in the past. One local minister warns his congregation that we live in "a broken world"; but while there is plenty of suffering in Belfast, the part that is truly broken seems kept at arm's length.
Like many of Wiseman's other films, the movie is suffused with a compassion that sees everyone in the camera's view as an equally worthy subject. At the same time the movie, which has no narrator and doesn't formally introduce anybody, maintains an aura of scientific detachment.
That's why "Belfast, Maine," like other Wiseman films, also conveys the sometimes slightly unnerving vision of the human anthill put under a magnifying glass.
>From Wiseman's earliest film, "Titicut Follies" (1967), a harsh
investigation of a prison for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, he has
always been fascinated by institutions as microcosms of that anthill. His
films have included two studies of high schools and two of hospitals, as
well as portraits of an urban police department, a juvenile court, a Chicago
housing development and the welfare system.
By focusing on an entire community instead of one element of the system, "Belfast, Maine" finds the director integrating aspects of his earlier movies into a fuller vision of how everything works together. His choices of which cogs in the social system to emphasize are extremely revealing. The two activities to which the film devotes the most time are people working in factories, stores and restaurants, and social services for the sick and the elderly.
The scenes of fish and potatoes being harvested and processed and of fresh baked goods being prepared have a hypnotic fascination. There's something deeply reassuring in watching how a food product is made from scratch by silent, dedicated workers patiently executing their mechanical tasks in hygienic settings. (The speed with which women slice off the heads and tails of sardines to be packed in cans is remarkable.)
Their patience is mirrored by the forbearance of the social and welfare workers calmly questioning clients about their health, medication, living habits and states of mind. One of the film's most vivid characters is a mentally disturbed, physically ailing man, addicted to tobacco and dependent on welfare, who lives in a metal trailer and can barely lift himself out of his chair to be weighed. Yet in his own way he seems to be flourishing. For in addition to meeting his basic needs, his scrupulous care provides him with feelings of self-worth and social inclusion.
"Belfast, Maine," for all its pastoral beauty, is no seaside idyll. The statistics spouted about smoking and obesity in the area are alarming; many of the people on whom the film focuses are suffering physically and emotionally. The movie repeatedly reminds us how hard life really is. Those attuned to more sophisticated styles will also find Belfast plain and even downright boring.
Which is not to say that Belfast doesn't have an intellectual life. In the film's most moving scene a high-school teacher discoursing on "Moby-Dick" to his enthralled students speaks eloquently about 19th-century whaling, Herman Melville's troubled life, the working class and the tragic hero in literature. It is a startling bravura performance that captures a quality of faith, a spark of passion, that is inherent in all of Wiseman's mature films, even the most hard-bitten ones.
Handsomely photographed by John Dewey, with every shot of the landscape a beautifully balanced composition, "Belfast, Maine," which is not rated, conveys a deeply emotional sense of place, season and time of day. In contrasting the breathtaking landscape with the troubled lives of many of those living there, it reminds us that the fleeting beauties of the natural world -- the simple pleasures available to all -- are among life's deepest consolations.
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Carl
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