Felixia (Carmen Moore) and Sick Boy (Jeremiah Bitsui) want more out of life in DRUNKTOWN’S FINEST
DRUNKTOWN’S FINEST (Sydney Freeland, 2014)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Opens Friday, February 20
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
www.drunktownsfinest.com
Award-winning film festival favorite Drunktown’s Finest is a refreshingly original look inside life on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. “They say this land isn’t a place to live; it’s a place to leave. Then why do people stay?” asks Nizhoni Smiles (MorningStar Angeline) at the beginning of writer-director Sydney Freeland’s debut feature, which opens with a shot of a town that could be any town. The story follows three teenagers trying to improve their lot by getting off the reservation. Sick Boy (Jeremiah Bitsui), who is about to have a child with Angela Maryboy (Elizabeth Frances), is trying to stay out of trouble the weekend before joining the army. Felixia (Carmen Moore) is a transsexual model attempting to jump-start her career by appearing in a Women of the Navajo calendar. And Nizhoni decides to track down her birth family before leaving to go to college in Michigan. The lives of the three protagonists intersect in unexpected ways as outside forces — and questionable decisions — complicate their chosen paths.
Drunktown’s Finest, which boasts Robert Redford as executive producer, might deal specifically with the plight of young Native Americans, but it works because of the universality of the emotions and desires it explores. Freeland lets the stories play out at a natural pace, not forcing any of the issues it raises, which include adoption, child abuse, crime, alcoholism, violence, and gender. The three leads all offer cogent portraits of their complex characters, making their plights sympathetic, believable, and relatable. Films like Drunktown’s Finest often get bogged down in oversentimentality and heavy messages, but Freeland’s smart, subtle script lifts it well above such narrow vanity projects. More than eight years in the making, Drunktown’s Finest was shot in fifteen days and completed via a successful Kickstarter campaign. The soundtrack includes several songs by the 1960s Navajo Nation band the Wingate Valley Boys, beginning and ending with their intoxicating, powerful “Beggar to a King,” a worthy metaphor for this gentle, bittersweet film and its characters’ struggles.