What do we mean when we say, “real-world superhero story”? By their very definition, superheroes break the world, transforming the mundane into the fantastical, the plausible into the magical. I’ll be honest with you, nothing gets my hackles up quicker than any filmmaker or writer crowing about doing a ‘real’ superhero story in this, the year of our lord 2019. That’s just not nearly enough on its own to merit any attention anymore, yet it still gets trotted out regularly like it’s the most incisive, mind-blowing narrative hook possible. Juxtaposing super-powers with real world locations and problems hasn’t been a novel idea since Stan Lee decided that underneath the mask, Spider-Man would be a gawky teenager in Queens with money problems, yet we still get a steady stream of product solemnly intoning that what you are about to watch/read isn’t some silly story, but is a serious consideration of the serious implications of superpowers, seriously.
I bring all this up because I’ve seen “real-world superhero story” bandied about in discussion of Julia Hart’s wonderful Fast Color, newly arrived on Blu-ray and digital, and that feels like a misnomer to me. There are superpowers in this film, and there are those who are charged with the awesome responsibility of wielding this power. But I don’t believe Hart is making any kind of grand, deconstructive statement about the nature of heroes or comics or anything like that. Instead, she has crafted a nimble fable that uses magic to illustrate the fraught emotional lives of her characters. The film’s dramatic hook is the film’s metaphor is the film’s story is the film’s central emotional arc.
Set an undisclosed number of years in the future, Fast Color opens on a dying, drying Earth. There has not been a drop of rain in almost a decade, turning water into a precious commodity that is carefully rationed. It’s not quite Mad Max, but you can see the fault-lines that will crack and break the world if people continue to be bereft of hope.
So maybe it’s fate that brings Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) back to her home in the Midwest. After all, she’s got a unique power: When she suffers a seizure, the Earth quakes and shakes along with her.
We meet Ruth on the run, struggling mightily to hold onto a hard-won sobriety. Years after she fled her home after…something…happened, Ruth returns to the farmhouse where she grew up in search of her mother, Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) and her daughter, Lila (Saniyya Sidney). Strange power runs in the family, and Ruth seems to hope that if she can heal the rifts between herself and her family, she can take control of the seizures and prevent any further devastation. While flashbacks show gardens swelling with greenery and flowers bursting with life and color, the farmhouse that awaits Ruth is brown and ruined, the unforgiven landscape stretching on forever isolating the characters with nothing but each other and their shared, unhappy histories.
“When something’s broken, it can’t be fixed,” Bo warns, and the remainder of Fast Color serves as a test of that theory.
When the film is just focused on these three women and their relationships to each other, to their abilities, and to the family history that terrifies and beguiles each in turn, Fast Color works tremendously well. Mbatha-Raw has been a compelling presence in films before, but she’s absolutely a movie star here, (I didn’t see Beyond the Lights, which I think turned a lot of people on to this idea a while ago. Better late than never!) ably carrying the film and capturing Ruth’s troubled emotional state even with long stretches without dialogue. She bounces well off both Toussaint and Sidney, forming a triptych of powerful women uneasy with that power.
For Bo, it’s a matter of knowing too much, while for Lila it’s a matter of being hungry to know more. Ruth’s presence disrupts the equilibrium the woman and the girl have established between one another, and Fast Color takes its time letting you see the tensions begin to mount. Even at a fairly tight 100-minutes, the film moves deliberately as it parcels out the details of what drove Ruth away, what drives Bo’s desire to stay put and what fuels Lila’s desire to leave.
As for the abilities that the women wield, this is not an Avengers movie. The special effects are used sparingly, and when they do show up bear ample evidence of the film’s low budget. But Hart isn’t after spectacle here, instead using the powers as an Expressionistic flourish that underlines the emotional state of the characters. Ruth’s journey to reclaiming autonomy over her abilities and her life is internal rather than external, with superpowers used as a means to illustrate the ebbs and flows of that quest. The moment when it all comes together for her and she pulls together past and present so she might better face the future is one of the most exhilarating sequences I’ve seen in any movie this year, a near-perfect melding of a genre movie’s supernatural story with a drama film’s understanding of human pathos.
If Fast Color has a speed-bump, it’s whenever Hart feels the need to wander away from the house. David Strathairn shows up as a sheriff troubled by the signs that Ruth has returned, and while Strathairn is such a national treasure that it’s a wonder Nic Cage hasn’t kidnapped him to search for a treasure map, the film grinds to a halt whenever it cuts away to him on the trail, and the eventual payoff to his approach is the one area where Fast Color’s commitment to a stately pace starts to rankle. When Strathairn does join the main action of the film, he’s given little to do besides recite backstory and explanation, and while Strathairn is too damn good an actor not to imbue even these kinds of purely functional scenes with nuance and character, it still feels like something of waste.
More frustrating is the other subplot taking you away from Ruth and her family, this one concerning a scientist that Ruth encounters and escapes early in the film, played by Christopher Denham. There isn’t as much of this material as I feared, but it’s the most boring possible element you could fold into a story like this. How many times do we have to watch secret government agents chase after psychics and superheroes because of military applications or some shit like that before someone comes up with something else to eat up time in one of these movies? The Fury was over 40 years ago, and unless you’ve got a head-pop to rival what Brian de Palma did to John Cassavetes at the end of that movie sitting in your back-pocket, I’m not interested anymore. Denham’s trying some interesting things as a performer, but it’s a no-win scenario. There’s enough material with him and the other agents to feel like an annoying distraction, but not nearly enough for it to ever feel like he’s playing a nuanced, interesting character worthy of our attention.
But the material in the house with Ruth, Bo, and Lila is strong enough to be worth the investment. In making a film about three generations of black women uniting in a shared heritage of both suffering and power, Hart has given the world something beautiful that has no easy precursor in recent cinema, at least to my knowledge. By using the framework of a superhero story, she has given herself license to explore themes of self-destruction and redemption in a manner that is raw and forceful while also operating as a tremendously satisfying sci-fi story.
Fast Color, then, is that kind of treasure that is both in conversation with the medium’s past while also standing alone as its own unique work of art. You would do well to bear witness.
