Independent filmmakers' growth shows on-screen
WEEKEND: REVIEW
By ANDREW S. HUGHES
Tribune Staff Writer
SOUTH BEND -- By looking backward, director Tim Richardson and his filmmaking partners have taken a great leap forward with "Kill the Messenger."
Set during the Civil War, "Kill the Messenger" combines elements of espionage thrillers, buddy movies and coming-of-age stories to explore the futility of war and of hatred and the conflicts that can arise from loyalty to a cause or person.
The movie, co-written by Richardson and Michael Kouroubetes, takes a few curious facts from history and uses them as the springboards for its plot.
"Kill the Messenger" begins on July 19, 1863, at the Battle of Buffington Island, the only battle to occur in Ohio during the Civil War and one of the war's northernmost battles. In that same month, John Wilkes Booth is performing in Cleveland; soon after, the actor, a Confederate sympathizer, disappears from the public record for three months.
As Union soldiers round up Confederate prisoners after the battle, two Confederate brothers, Daniel (Bryce Cone) and Drake (Shayne Golden), disguise themselves as Union soldiers and attempt to deliver a secret message to a Union traitor, Lt. Hatcher (Sean McCormick), who intends to sell the message to Booth (John Finnegan).
When Drake is wounded and Hatcher reveals himself as untrustworthy, Daniel scrambles to get the letter to Booth and recruits a Union photographer, Benjamin Harris (John Coffman), to help him deliver it. Hatcher grabs Drake and forces him to help him chase Daniel across the Ohio countryside; Hatcher wants the message so that he can still sell it to Booth rather than see it delivered for free, as Daniel would likely do with it.
Based on a viewing of a near-final cut of the movie, "Kill the Messenger" has a professional look and sensibility to it that Richardson and Kouroubetes' two previous feature films, "Bloodlines" and "a:\Kill," didn't quite attain.
The battle footage comes from a re-enactment staged in Hastings, Mich., and it's very good material that opens the movie with an exciting action sequence that could have lasted another few minutes without detracting from the movie's pacing. Richardson interweaves shots of Daniel and Drake running through the woods at the periphery of the battle with the battle shots to introduce these two characters and establish them as being on the run, and the technique works well.
After the battle, however, the movie stumbles as it spends much of its first act mired in slow and stiff exposition and scene setting that, in some places, serve as dead-end detours away from the main story.
One scene, when Harris describes the Battle of Bull Run to Daniel, veers between being interesting and dramatic (the historical details) and being arch and insincere (Harris' description of his wife's death at Bull Run). Richardson sets much of Harris' tale to stills from "Second Sight," a short film about Bull Run that he and Kouroubetes made as a prequel to "Kill the Messenger." The technique accounts for much of the tale's effectiveness and echoes the intriguing visual language of the opening credits.
The pace and acting revive for the second and third acts. The plot becomes more involving and layered, and several action sequences provide a good deal of energy to the story.
Daniel's backstory comes out when he and Benjamin take refuge in the home of a freed slave, Ethan (Andrew Lockhart). The son of an abolitionist minister who was hanged in Kentucky, Daniel parrots his older brother's pro-South philosophy. He lashes out at Ethan and all other blacks in an angry outburst that effectively shows his immaturity and the shakiness of his convictions.
As the movie progresses, it builds to a climax that far exceeds what precedes it -- both in this movie and in Richardson's previous features.
In that scene, Hatcher and Booth square off in a dramatic battle of wills and philosophies that moves from speech to action when Daniel joins them. Benjamin, who appears throughout the movie as a man of inaction, evolves suddenly into a hero.
"Kill the Messenger," however, should have ended at that scene. Instead, Richardson cuts to a final scene that needlessly ties up loose ends in Daniel's life and that steals some of the power contained in the movie's climactic scene.
By choosing to make a movie set during the Civil War, Richardson and his collaborators set out to make a bold statement about their abilities as filmmakers. They succeeded in making it a positive statement. "Kill the Messenger" has its flaws, but it entertains while overcoming technical hurdles that most truly independent filmmakers -- those who, like Richardson, shoot on digital tape rather than film and who have five-figure budgets -- avoid by setting their work in the present day and relying more on dialogue than action to tell their stories.
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