Warm 'Summer' reaches us at last
Young director's vision sustains this reflective coming-of-age tale shot on the N.C. coast
LAWRENCE TOPPMAN
Mark Freiburger on the set of "Dogs Days of Summer."
DOG DAYS OF SUMMER
Stars: Will Patton, Devon Gearhart, Colin Ford, Richard Herd
Director: Mark Freiburger
Running time: 89 minutes
Rating: Unrated (mildly adult themes, mild language)
When you first have a camera in your hands, "everything in the world looks as though it should be photographed," says the narrator of "Dog Days of Summer." But making choices between the useful and the useless, the crucial shot and the merely beautiful one, is the mark of a director who knows what he's doing. Mark Freiburger knows.
The feature debut from this N.C. School of the Arts' alumnus (not counting one he directed hastily in high school) is finally getting a theatrical run in his former hometown.
It was shot almost three years ago in the coastal town of Edenton, and it has taken a tortuous path to the screen: near-deals with distributors and potential DVD backers, culminating in a limited theatrical release by Mountain Top. (Gary Wheeler, who directed and produced “The List” last year, runs that company. Freiburger says he and Wheeler are now working to adapt another novel by Charlotte author Robert Whitlow.)
Foreign deals keep rolling in for “Dog Days” – TV in Canada and Latin America, all rights in Poland – and Freiburger's confident a domestic DVD release is in the works. But if you see “Dog Days,” you'll know why marketers shied away from something so difficult to pigeonhole.
It's a coming-of-age story, sort of. It's a piece about evil lurking beneath the placid surface of untested goodness, yet also an affirmation that the best elements in our makeup will prevail. We never know for sure whether the main adult character, played with deft ambiguity by Will Patton, is a magician or a charlatan, a con artist or a wiser-upper of naive humanity.
Eli Cottonmouth (Patton) chugs into this unnamed town to amaze residents with the intricate model of a circus in the back of his vehicle. He convinces the mayor (Richard Herd) to hire him to make a similar masterpiece for the town's 250th anniversary, then enlists young Phillip and Jackson (Devon Gearhart and Colin Ford) to shoot “research” photos.
Their eyes are freshly opened to their town's beauty, but also to its ugliness: a sports hero assaults an old man, a father's infidelity inspires his wife to stray, an alcoholic blind man vents unmerited rage. When a young woman vanishes, her disappearance seems to fit in with some malevolent metaphysical pattern.
Screenwriters Travis Beacham and Christopher Waild, who concocted the story with Freiburger, don't have a firm enough grip on their material. It feels elongated in places, and a climactic confession turns the movie briefly to melodrama.
Yet the flavor of drowsy summer nights in a small town comes through. The mood of this languidly appealing film doesn't falter; the movie rolls gently on, like a peaceful stream that hides nasty currents in the deep water. Atmosphere counts most here, and Freiburger does a good job of balancing the rough facts of life with occasional flights of fancy.
Cinematographer Rob Givens now works as assistant cameraman on films with much bigger budgets, including the upcoming Kate Beckinsale-Dakota Fanning horror movie “Winged Creatures.” His apt images for “Dog Days,” usually lovely but sometimes unsettling, prove that the right pair of eyes can turn a low bank balance into high-quality work onscreen.
