In life and in art, Mark Kelley is a felon, small-time drug dealer and pretty sweet guy. He's an addict who is hoping to get clean during his next stint in jail; he's a reprobate who will shoot up a pregnant woman but, on screen, the Louisiana con also emerges as a figure of love, hope and charity – both ours and his own.
Kelley is the star, or at least the central character, in The Other Side, the latest film from Roberto Minervini, the Italian-born, Texas-based documentarian who calls on members of the American South's white underclass to perform versions of their lives for his camera. And, for all the grimness of Kelley's circumstances, he does just that to considerable effect – which is why it is so frustrating that he disappears from the action two-thirds of the way through to be replaced by less interesting figures.
In previous films, all of them featured this weekend in Toronto in a TIFF Cinematheque showcase of Minervini's work, the director has provocatively mixed documentary and fiction. Stop the Pounding Heart, for example, is a tale of star-crossed lovers fashioned from the circumstances of two real people. In the 2013 feature, Minervini casts the daughter of a devout Christian family and a Texas bull rider in a fictional romance shot in their real surroundings.
Here, The Other Side feels like a true document of Mark's life, despite the inclusion of some artistically surreal images of him lying naked in the woods or paddling shirtless through the bayou. Everywhere else, Minervini achieves a remarkable degree of fly-on-the-wall realism as Mark and his girlfriend do drugs and make love.
There's some meandering talk of politics – Mark, who is casually racist, says unprintable things about Barack Obama – especially during visits with an old drunkard named Jim, but Minervini has also clearly fashioned a narrative arc about Mark's addiction, a pending three-month jail sentence, and his mother's approaching death. Some moments feel ethically queasy: What do you do when someone proposes injecting drugs into the arm of a pregnant stripper while your camera is rolling? But mainly the approach is notable for the way it humanizes Mark and the family he dearly loves.
Minervini is much less successful in humanizing the gang who replace Mark on screen for the film's final scenes. They are a group of gun-toting, Obama-hating conspiracy theorists who are out in the woods doing military exercises to prepare for some violent collapse of their civil liberties that their leader assures them is coming around the next bend. When the leader explains they are not Boy Scouts out playing war games but rather men intent on protecting their families, you can be forgiven for thinking, "Yeah, right."
Perhaps their guns represent an alternative to Mark's crystal meth, an escape from a world that pains them, a different outlet for anger, but any connection is left entirely to the viewer. In the end, the power of Minervini's pseudo-fiction gives way to a much blander version of pseudo-reality.
The Other Side: The Films of Roberto Minervini runs at TIFF Bell Lightbox June 10-12 (tiff.net).
Kate Taylor