As a chaser to Richard Linklater’s monumental Boyhood, take a peek at this Sundance award-winning documentary profiling three destitute white kids from rural Missouri. Their level of poverty and all-around impoverishment makes Linklater’s screen kid look like he’s part of the Trump family.
Three distinctively different kids emerge. One is all-get-out upbeat, another, mostly dour misanthropic; the third, an interesting mess of charismatic, vain, and simpleminded. They hook you.
Directors and first cousins Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo return to a town that Tracy’s dad grew up in, and whose mom was a pillar of the community as an influential teacher. Trust was granted and it shows. When kid #3 (Harley) reveals a big secret mid-film, you get the idea he felt safe doing so–something that was certainly not part of his prior worldview. He sleeps on a couch at his paternal grand mom’s. When it”s time for Halloween trick-or-treating, even though he’s 15 and a little old for it, he designs an ingenious Insane Clown Posse costume. All this repressed creativity going to waste. He makes a point to ask grandma to make sure she captures him smoking a cigarette as she takes photos….
….Kid #2 (Appachey), who’s only 12, also smokes like a chimney. His mom is quite distant although we understand. She explains she jumped from growing up herself at 17 years old at her mom’s house to becoming a mom herself shortly afterward. Near the conclusion of Rich Hill, as her son is headed off to a hearing that will likely send him to a juvenile detention center, she suddenly wakes up and offers him solace. Is she propelled to offer kindness once she’s alleviated of the nuisance of having to deal with this monster on a daily basis?
Kid #1 (Andrew, 14), meanwhile, perseveres despite his family moving their residence what seems like weekly. We wait for a shoe to drop on this kid–it all seems too good to be true. He bonds with his twin sister and even offers his own infirm mom a little parenting. The farthest he goes in losing his positive spirit is a contemplative moment when he wonders aloud if God will see fit to include him in his plans. Meanwhile, his itinerant Dad seems content with pursuing a musician career pipe dream as a Hank Williams impersonator, and with idle dreams of “prospecting for gold.” As a parallel, Appachey dreams of working in China as some sort or art history adept even though he shows no academic chops whatsoever.
Meanwhile Droz Tragos, who won an Emmy for the 2004 documentary Be Good Smile Pretty, spreads the Terence Malick dust a little too thick. While subsequent Fourth of July celebrations bookend the film, there’s a little too much meandering in filler shots of nature that may offer a cultural context alright but seem excessive. But I quibble. Rich Hill is a hell of a documentary. It will have you wondering what happens to these kids as time goes on. It also convincingly portrays American poverty as anything but an urban-and-black exclusive enterprise.