Director captures the Northwest's working class

What occurs to me first, after having watched a sampling of four films by Brion Rockwell, is that some of the best film footage of the Pacific Northwest comes from those who spend just enough time elsewhere to appreciate this region more deeply.

David Lynch's childhood began in Missoula, Montana, Sandpoint, Idaho, and Spokane (one of my own early hometowns) before the rest of his youth was spent in the South and Northeast, and he captured this region's flavor flawlessly in "Twin Peaks."

Likewise, Rockwell put in enough school time in New York to attend Syracuse University (we both attended SU a few years apart in the 1990s), but he came away from the experience with decidedly more mixed feelings about the Washington rain he'd once sought to escape, as expressed in his 1997 feature film, "Where the Air Is Cool and Dark," just as my own adolescence in New England made me miss the common sight of rural grain elevators in Eastern Washington and Idaho.

I watched "Where the Air Is Cool and Dark" on Amazon, along with Rockwell's 2022 "Not the Most Careful of Girls," a rough but mostly completed cut of his noir romance "Till I Reach You," and a little more than 20 minutes of selected scenes from his coming-of-age dramedy "We All Got Up to Dance."

Rockwell directed and produced all four aforementioned films, and wrote all but "Till I Reach You," which was written by Brendan Besa.

The four films evoke the subtly distinctive cultures of each corner of the Puget Sound where they were shot on location, including Seattle, Tacoma, Shelton, Port Townsend and Bremerton.

Like Lynch's "Twin Peaks," Rockwell's "Where the Air Is Cool and Dark" and "We All Got Up to Dance" juxtapose the pristine vistas of the Northwest with the more granular industrial realities of its working-class communities.

Far too few filmmakers are willing to depict the prickly parts of a romantic relationship that tend to follow a spontaneous meet-cute, as mutually defensive insecurity sparks arguments between partners who barely know each other to begin with, but Rockwell makes this material authentically uncomfortable in not only "Where the Air Is Cool and Dark," but also in "Not the Most Careful of Girls" and "Till I Reach You."

All of Rockwell's films address addiction in one form or another, always with empathy, and while "Where the Air Is Cool and Dark" shows how recovering addicts can lead each other into dangerous relapses if they're not careful, "Not the Most Careful of Girls" shows a former cocaine user helping a Seattle prostitute build a better life for herself because he understands, from the inside, what sorts of steps she needs to take next.

And not surprisingly for a guy who loves films enough to make his own independently, nearly all of Rockwell's films include at least one movie buff, from the mid-1990s VHS video store clerk who's swept off his feet by an impulsive birthday girl in "Till I Reach You," to the aspiring filmmaker who takes in the prostitute in "Not the Most Careful of Girls," to student filmmaker, part-time logger and covert weed-grower Emmett LeClair in "Where the Air Is Cool and Dark."

Rockwell benefits from a couple of solid recurring performers. Damien P. Daley was a highlight of "Where the Air Is Cool and Dark" as Earl, a weathered logger with a wry wit, and I could have listened to him tell salty tales for ages. Daley's rueful wisdom makes him an equally tragic figure in "Till I Reach You," as a gambler who left his Midwestern family for the allure of tribal casinos, and is just barely self-aware enough to grasp how lonely he's made himself.

Tony Doupe is another good-luck charm for Rockwell, appearing as filmmaker Dylan Moody in "Not the Most Careful of Girls," as one of a pair of hitmen in "Till I Reach You," and as the alcoholic, abusive father of a 13-year-old Emmett LeClair in "We All Got Up to Dance," with a rarely blinking stare that's by turns concerned, unaffected and haunted.

Among the many virtues of "Where the Air Is Cool and Dark," from its intensely on-the-spot logging cinematography to its ruthless yet karmically earned conclusion, I love that Rockwell demonstrated the good grace to allow certain moments to simply happen onscreen, such as the film-within-a-film sequence of student director Emmett's sound crew recording a recovering addict's apparently unrehearsed guitar song, which felt like one of those "divine accidents" that Orson Welles extolled.

What impressed me most about "Till I Reach You" is that it's not just a '90s period piece, but with its 16mm filmstock, it could pass for an indie film shot during that decade, right down to all its tropes. From the young lovers on the road with nary a penny to their names to the swirling supporting cast of criminals and grifters to the amiably aimless chatter between everyone from our troubled lovers to the Vladimir-and-Estragon duo of hired killers, Rockwell and Besa clearly paid attention to the films of the 1990s while they were still running in theaters.

Likewise, what endeared me most to the clips of the 1969-70 period piece "We All Got Up to Dance" that I watched was how Rockwell cracked the code of little boys' emotional language.

When young Emmett (played by Brecken Merrill of "Yellowstone") brags that he didn't cry at all during a family funeral, it doesn't sound as cold as it would coming from an adult, because we understand this is a 13-year-old boy who's trying to prove to his peers that he's a "man" now.

And as a seven-year voluntary enlistee in the U.S. Navy, witnessing the quiet turmoil of Emmett's Vietnam draftee cousin is especially harrowing, as he struggles to explain why he doesn't take his friends up on their offer to smuggle him into Canada.

As Bill Hader put it so eloquently in HBO's "Barry," sometimes, you just have to shut up and do your job.

Wherever Rockwell goes from here, I'll be interested to follow his progress.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]