Summary
Freewheeling conversations and overlapping dialogue result in a unique documentary filled with profound thoughts from a bottle and uncomfortable observations.
The light seeping in through a briefly opened door is one of the few glimpses we get of the outside world once we enter the Roaring 20s, a dive bar held together by an eclectic mix of regulars.
Ushered inside by documentarians Bill and Turner Ross, we meet the establishment on its closing night. Sitting on the fringes of Las Vegas, far from the bright lights of the Strip, the regulars have gathered for one last hurrah to their drinking hole.
Save for some editing and the odd title card, the Ross brothers barely impose any narrative voice on the events. The effect is appropriately intoxicating. Immersing the viewer in a series of freewheeling conversations and overlapping dialogue, it’s like a beer-soaked Robert Altman film that’s been running continuously since the 70s.
It might sound like a claustrophobic nightmare, but what emerges from the red-lit world is a kind of hypnotic beauty. As the patrons get drunker, the barstool wisdom flows as freely as the liquor. We have no sense of how or why this group of people found the bar, only that they are here. “When nobody else don’t want your ass,” muses one patron, “you can come in here and have a good time.” Sometimes you gotta go where everybody knows your name.
Then the strangest thing happens. While the film remains ostensibly directionless and adrift, we start to become inebriated by the aimlessness. Cutaways to snippets on the TV become surreal vignettes, as if we’re viewing the world through beer goggles. Outsiders wander in, and we occasionally see youths outside smoking, but they now seem as strange as the barflies did at the start of the film.
“Get out of this bar while you’re still a musician and don’t go into another one.”
Without judgment or commentary, the filmmakers elicit empathy for these humans of the bar. There’s a particularly heartbreaking moment towards the end when one patron, who has been urging anybody who will listen to not follow his footsteps, wakes up to find he’s missed seeing everyone off. Having borne witness to the whole night, one might feel a wee bit guilty for not reaching out to wake him up.
“There is nothing more boring than a guy who used to do stuff,” croaks one barfly, “and he don’t do stuff no more because he’s in a bar.” Yet despite the love their camera shows these men, the brothers Ross seem to have already contradicted him. We have shared a small but significant part of their lives, but we may never know what becomes of them once the sun comes up. They don’t have to go home, but they can’t stay here.
2020 | US | DIRECTORS: Bill Ross, Turner Ross | CAST: Peter Elwell, Michael Martin, Shay Walker | DISTRIBUTOR: MIFF 2020 (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 98 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 6 – 23 August 2020 (MIFF)
