Audio By Carbonatix
At 73, the Memphis-born actor, stuntman, former U.S. Marine, and
Golden Gloves boxer Red West has the stoic, leathery repose of a barfly
on a John Ford or Howard Hawks saloon wall. He doesn’t talk much, and
when he does, reveals even less, but there’s an abyss of longing and
hurt in every one of his sagging, distant gazes — the sort of
face William Blake may have had in mind when he asked, “What is the
price of experience?” If West’s name rings a bell, however, it probably
has less to do with the more than 80 film and television credits he’s
amassed over a half-century in the business than with his off-screen
supporting role as friend, driver, and bodyguard to high school
classmate Elvis Presley. You can see West in the background of many
Presley films, as well as his share of hard-living hillbilly classics
(Walking Tall, Road House, et al.). Yet it’s taken until
now for him to snag a leading role, and the effect is like finding an
old buffalo nickel in the recesses of a dusty bureau — its worth
derived not from its assigned value, but from the places it has been
and the hands it has passed through.
As William, a taciturn senior who seems to be planning for his final
days, West takes center stage in Goodbye Solo, the third feature
co-written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, who, at 34, has quietly
emerged as one of the major figures in the American independent film
scene. Bahrani’s two previous films, the excellent Man Push Cart
(2005) and Chop Shop (2007), were tightly wound,
location-specific character studies, heavily influenced by the work of
the Dardenne brothers, but with their own unfettered eye for immigrant
workers living hand-to-mouth on the margins of New York City society.
With Goodbye Solo, Bahrani broadens his focus — or at
least shifts it south — to his hometown of Winston-Salem, North
Carolina. His fundamental interest, however, remains unseen people, or
people we might see and never think twice about: the push-cart vendor
who sells us our morning coffee; the motherless youth handing out
estimates at a Queens body shop; an old man who wishes to die without
leaving so much as a trace. Among the emerging generation of American
filmmakers, he is one of the few (along with Wendy and Lucy‘s
Kelly Reichardt and the Half Nelson team of Ryan Fleck and Anna
Boden) who possesses a disciplined sense of composition and form, a
vision of the world that extends beyond the boundaries of his own
navel, and the understanding that it is possible to make films about
class and race in this country without pandering to the audience.
What’s consistently remarkable about Bahrani’s work is his steadfast
refusal to peddle cheap sentiment, or to mine for hope where there is
none to be found. His favored locations are urban streets and
businesses that emphasize his characters’ sense of displacement, the
notion that home is something enjoyed by other people. And while all
his films to date deal, to some extent, with entrepreneurial endeavors,
it is not riches that Bahrani’s ragged protagonists seek, but merely a
finer quality of rags. In Goodbye Solo, the small-scale social
climber is the title character (excellent newcomer Souléymane Sy
Savané), a Senegalese-born taxi driver who cruises the nighttime
streets of Winston-Salem while training for a future career as a flight
attendant, despite the disapproval of his pregnant Mexican wife (Carmen
Leyva), who wants him close to home. A chatty Solo picks up William as
a fare but finds his irrepressible good cheer lost on his passenger,
who wants only to be dropped off at a nearby movie theater and picked
up two hours later. Then William adds one more request: On a specified
date in the near future, he wants the cabbie to drive him to the top of
a local mountain, Blowing Rock, and leave him there — no
questions asked.
In its premise and its many long driving scenes, Goodbye Solo
seems guaranteed to earn comparisons to Iranian director Abbas
Kiarostami’s 1997 masterpiece Taste of Cherry, in which a
similarly suicidal man drives the streets of Tehran seeking a volunteer
to throw dirt on his freshly dug grave. But while Bahrani is
undoubtedly indebted to Kiarostami — and, as remakes go, this
sort of thing is eminently preferable to Hollywood’s countless
repackagings — the connection between the two films is less
significant than it first appears. Whereas Kiarostami’s driver and
passengers remained isolated from one another in both formal and human
terms, Goodbye Solo is ultimately about the fragile but profound
friendship that forms between these men as Solo becomes, in effect,
William’s funerary chauffeur. The more the driver tries to discern some
meaningful details about his passenger’s life, the more William
retreats. So, too, does Bahrani hold his characters at some enigmatic
distance from the audience, refusing to reveal all their secrets,
mindful of the foolish notion that it is possible to truly “know”
another person after 90 minutes of screen time. Finally, as at the end
of every Bahrani film, we arrive at a place where a few poetic images
say more than any words or facts possibly could: Dawn breaks, a car
disappears into the morning mist, and life goes on.
