By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 9, 2008

There is the sound of geese -- hundreds, thousands of them -- and footsteps in a wet, barren field, the cotton all cut down to nubs, the black earth stretching out to infinity. There is a lone black teenager in a heavy coat. Icy water in the plowed rows. Gray, gray, gray sky. There is a car passing, tires whining on the asphalt. Silence. Two saltbox houses, tin roofs.

This is the beginning of "Ballast," a film from first-time director Lance Hammer and a cast of first-time screen actors, and this is the Mississippi Delta as you've probably not seen it before, because this is the most predominantly black section of the most predominantly black state in America, "the most Southern place on Earth," in the popular phrase.

It's not the land of storied myth that people so love to imagine, the home of the blues, the Devil and the midnight crossroads, Big Daddy and mendacity, potbellied sheriffs, Emmett Till, Civil War reenactors driving Ford trucks with dented fenders and gun racks in the rear window.

It's not how Hollywood or anyone else wants it to be. It just is. It's painful. It's beautiful.

The film opens in Washington on Friday.

"It was January and I was in Memphis on another project several years ago, and I just went for a drive down into the Delta," the Los Angeles-based Hammer, 41, is saying over the phone, explaining the movie's origins almost a decade ago. "It was rainy and cold and silent and barren and the fields were fallow. I got down south of Clarksdale and stopped the car and got out and was overwhelmed by a sense of sorrow. It was almost existential."

He wondered: Could he make a movie that caught that feeling? Could he, as a self-described "outsider," get that atmosphere into a story? Could he make a movie set in the deep South that wasn't about heat, humidity and the vestiges of slavery and segregation? That didn't have a gospel choir, Spanish moss, a trailer park, alcohol, a sleazy pastor, a house with columns, racial epithets, Scripture, cutesy old white women wearing hats, or a tail-thumping dog in the front yard?

Well, yes. With the exception of the dog. No reason to get carried away.

He started with a script about a pair of elderly twin brothers -- his mother was an identical twin -- and in the original draft, they were white. He spent two years working on changes, making the characters black, in light of the Delta's demographic reality. Most counties near here are at least 60 percent black, and Holmes County (where I was born, and where much of the movie was filmed) is 78 percent black.

He wound up with a very spare story about the emotional fallout of a twin brother's suicide. The brothers are not poor, not by regional standards. They own a convenience store out on Highway 49 and own their tiny tin-roofed houses and the property they sit on.

By 2005, Hammer was going to churches and recreation centers, looking for local talent. He wound up with Michael J. Smith Sr., a purchasing agent at Yazoo City's Public Service Commission, in the lead role of Lawrence, the dead man's brother. He'd never acted a day in his life. Neither had JimMyron Ross, who plays a troubled teenager. Hammer met him at a Boys & Girls Club. Tarra Riggs, a local theater actress down in Jackson, the state capital, won the part of Marlee, the dead man's lover.

To build the realism of the story, Hammer would not show his cast the script. He described the general plot of the story, and how a specific scene fit into it. He might let them look at a couple pages of script for two or three minutes, and then told them to act out the scene as they would themselves, in real life.

It led to a few, truly only-in-Mississippi moments. Lawrence tells James in one scene that he must leash the dog when taking him for a walk, because "if he scents a deer, he'll strike out."

"That Mississippi dialect just came out," Smith, 38, says with a laugh, in a telephone interview. "There was so much I said that was just off the top of my head."

Riggs was so nervous, despite her stage experience, that she "went in a room and cried" on the first day of filming. "But it was a good story. It made sense to me. I was allowed to create a real person, not just a movie character."

The characters are more complicated at the end than at the beginning. And it may be the only Southern movie ever made that does not cater to race or accents or sexuality or even the notorious heat.

Despite rave reviews and major awards at Sundance this year (for direction and cinematography), Hammer has been distributing the film himself. It has earned all of about $50,000 in a few weeks of limited release. According to Boxofficemojo.com, "Ballast" hasn't played on more than four screens anywhere in the country at any one time. There has been the inevitable question at film festivals about the cultural propriety of a white director making a film entirely about black people.

"It never occurred to us in making the film, and I was surprised when I saw that," Riggs says. "The question is whether or not you are qualified to do the story. It never occurred to me that Lance could not do this."

And so "Ballast" is out there, a film named for the way a weight in your life can stabilize you or drag you down. It's about a place so barren and so Godforsaken lonely and poor that it feels like the rain in November comes down not on your face but on your soul. It will make you want to run for the freight train that barrels by the roadside and jump on and ride it up to Chicago, down to New Orleans, out to Los Angeles, anywhere but here.

And yet the place has some sort of unnameable beauty in all the little churches and the towering oaks and the levees and catfish ponds and the graveyards of the dead who will never leave, many of whom are related to you. The Delta, like the film it inspired, worms its way into your heart and does not leave, a mark that is as much a scar as it is a name.