American Folk
In the days following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a certain quiet took over as the American people, unsure of what to say to loved ones or strangers, attempted to grapple with the magnitude of what had happened. Jammed telephone lines made it difficult to reach relatives in New York City, and many travelers were stranded as air traffic was grounded. In American Folk, Elliott ( Joe Purdy) and Joni (Amber Rubarth) are seatmates on an early morning flight from Los Angeles to New York. Elliot is an itinerant session musician with no fixed address on his way to a gig, and Joni has been in LA for a wedding and is eager to get home to her sick mother. When the flight is ordered back to where it came from, she takes him under her wing, seemingly unconcerned by his pensive, slightly angry demeanor, and finds them a van in which to cross the country.
The road movie that unfolds — and the friendship that develops — is slow and careful. Joni has musical abilities of her own, and the two bond over a shared love of American folk music. They find that their voices are made to go together. But the title does double duty, functioning both as a reference to a genre of music and to the people Joni and Elliott encounter along the way. American Folk is a period piece about the United States as it was for just a few days, in those moments after our long freedom from foreign attacks on our own soil was shattered, but before cynicism and xenophobia took hold — supposedly — of the flyover country through which Joni and Elliott drive.
In one pivotal scene, Joni and Elliot meet a Vietnam veteran (David Fine) living off the grid in New Mexico who has not yet heard of the events of 9/11. The vet tells them, with great feeling, that music saves lives. The trust between the three in this scene is raw and beautiful. It was a week in which many pundits declared irony dead, and the story’s tenderness is evidence of that impulse in that there is nothing snarky or clever going on here. The filmmaker, David Heinz, takes a very naturalistic approach to exposition, presenting the news of what has happened in the country via ambient news on radio and television. Heinz often risks traversing the fine line between earnestness and sentimentality. But perhaps a little naked emotion is unavoidable in a movie that transports viewers so effectively to a time before our collective national heart hardened into ideological impasse. — Jennifer Levin