George Washington Rating: Sorry, this product is not currently available. Cast: Candace Evanofski Donald Holden William Holden Jason Scott Lee Complete Cast (9 total)

George Washington Reviews

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Hypnotic
In one of the opening scenes of George Washington, a boy and a girl break up. There is not much else to this scene, which makes it like most breaks ups. It makes it like many of our experiences is childhood: they just happen. The movie George Washington, however, mixes such everyday happenings in a poor, rural/industrial landscape with a level of complexity that is suprising and revealing. The characters experience love, loss, friendship, joy, forgiveness, boredom, and a longing for something more. The characters like each other. Some are white, and most of them are black, but they are all friends. Every summer, kids all over the country experience the kinds of events that many kids experience, yet there is a tragedy that occurs in this movie that renders this story unique. Tragedy aside, George Washington is simply a beautiful and quiet film about one hot summer in the south and it's children.

A very American beauty: deprivation made cute.
'George Washington' can feel like dutiful viewing, something you know is probably good for your moral and cultural health, like public service broadcasting. Like 'To Kill a Mockingbird' wrenched from its comfortable, white middle-class perspective, 'George' sacrifices realism to mood. We get many images of poverty and abandonment, of scrapyards, rusted debris, impoverished lots, rank public lavatories, delapidated houses, unemployment, but never any insight into how these things came about, beyond the odd photograph of the first President Bush. Furthermore, this poverty and decay isn't real, felt poverty and decay, but absurdly fetishised in gorgeously over-composed tableaux, where the bright glare of the sun seems to suffuse these meticulous long shots with glowing aureoles. this langorous summer atmosphere, the prevalence of mangy animals, the often excruciatingly precocious, cod-poetic voiceover, the 'mature', coffee-table-serious soundtrack, all bespeak a Harper Lee-style moral earnestness wrapped up in a sandwich bag of aestheticism. Even a deserted, bloody corpse looks pretty.

what makes 'George' at all watchable, even enjoyable, is the cast. there is a mendacious assumption in some critical quarters that the use of non-professionals in film is somehow superior to and more honest than trained actors, with their tics, tricks and evasions. Amateurs couldn't be less 'real', their stumbling self-consciousness resulting in a stiltedness that has little to do with everyday life. What non-professionals bring is an awareness of the camera, an acknowledgement professionals try to hide. We watch amateurs performing beng 'real', and the best scenes here are not the moody, poetic ones of strained solitude, but the sequences of interaction, with the characters kidding around, trying to stage their own self-image, or the image they want to project. This results in some surprisingly funny moments, especially when George becomes a superhero, his cape and dogskin/racoon hat jarring against the rundown environment; but it also brings you so close to the characters, that you feel an unheard-of visceral identification with them, especially when bad things happen. A constant motif through the film is of light filtering through racks and gaps - for me this light emanates from the wonderful actors rather than the poverty-chic mise-en-scene.

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