I went to the second showing of “The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia” at the downtown Park Place Stadium Theaters on Friday. I loved it. The theater manager told me that it was projected digitally and it looked great. ( They are installing a full digital projection system in to their main theater finally, joining Marquee which has spent millions doing it a few years ago.) I really thought that the film was a masterpiece. (Hopefully, the film will run for more than a week downtown. I don’t know of any other theater in WV showing the film.)
The reason WHY it is a masterpiece is NOT because of the crazy and self-destructive lives of the White clan, but the filmic artistry used by the filmmakers to reveal what such lives are really like. That is WHY the first film, “Dancing Outlaw” was so great – to compress in to 25 minutes so many insights in to a distorted man’s life without obviously making judgement is almost unknown in cinema. This new film continues where Jacob Young left off twenty years ago, and shows that the Whites have paid a terrible price for becoming welfare criminals at the instigation of their father, the infamous mountain dancer.
During the course of this year the mother who has raised all of the Whites and orphaned local children dies and is buried. One of the nieces of Jesco loses her newborn baby to Child Protection Services because of drugs in its blood. When Jesco visits the family cemetary, and goes through the headstones of his brothers and sisters, I was almost overcome with grief I have seldom felt in any film. I myself have lost my oldest three siblings and have some awarenesss of what that does to a person.
Statistics show that there are many White-type people all over WV, the country, and the world. A recent film, “A Prophet,” made in France and winner of the top award at Cannes, shows the life of an Arab young man who has to either kill or be killed, and how he rises in the prison system. It was a very harrowing film to watch, just like this film.
I often tell people if they want to read depressing stories, read the Bible or the front page of the daily newspapers. Life is often sad. But life can also be happy, and there is plenty of that in this film, and some even in “A Prophet.”
I hope everyone in WV gets to see this film on the Big Screen, and learn that the camera tells the truth. This film should make all of WV’s drug users stop using, and go straight. Who is their right mind wants to end up like Jesco and his clan? ( I was born in to a family almost as crazy as the Whites, and luckily, myself and my younger brother were saved by our college educations. The rest of my own clan, famous in Minnesota for boxing, is now dead, or not doing so well. It was ironic that the one White who has escaped their curse now lives in Minnesota. Minnesota does have lots of crazy people, but it also has lots of programs to help them, etc. I was one of those people, sent to library school after a serious work-related injury.)
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