Review: Honeydripper - Old-Worldly Charm review

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The latest film by John Sayles, the uncompromising American director who has made 16 films (including this) while staying within the almost completely impossible scenario of not bowing before Hollywood studios, has taken quite some time to travel to this side of the planet. But the wait for Honeydripper is worth it to a great extent.

A quaint little film full of old-worldly charm, Honeydripper, with its languorous pace, is for those who love their stories to be told with a pace in which you read a novel in leisure. It is no epic, but takes the viewer on a journey into interesting times in America.

The story is set in the 1950s, in Alabama, in a one-street town of mostly Black people. The town is called Harmony, and keeping to its euphonious name, its people love music, specially Blues. It is here that Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover in an impressive performance) runs a lounge bar, the Honeydripper. It had seen better days, but of late it is down in the dumps, with a hip ‘˜n' happening neighbouring bar attracting most of the clientele drawn from the townspeople of cotton croppers and nearby army camp.
Purvis, having been denied credit by suppliers and his landlord breathing down his neck for not paying the rent, devises a plan to get Honeydripper back into shape - he invites Guitar Sam, a legendary guitarist whose performances townspeople have loved through the jukebox. On the appointed day, however, Guitar Sam does not arrive, and Purvis now has to adopt an emergency plan - He invites a young boy, working in the cotton farm and claiming to be able to play the guitar as good as Guitar Sam. Do things turn out to be good, or does it bring back old demons.

The film, released by NDTV Lumiere in a limited way in Indian (read metropolitan) multiplexes on January 30, has won quite a few awards since it was made in 2007 - among them, the outstanding independent film award at the 2008 NAACP Image Award and the best screenplay award at the 2007 San Sebastian International Film Festival - and has been screened at the Toronto and London Film Festivals.

An independent film in every sense of the term, despite the presence of a big Hollywood star like Glover, Honeydripper is an interesting peek into the lives of the Black community people in the 1950s, made more interesting by the present times when the White House has acquired its first Black resident. Though music is a theme that runs through the film, it really comes into being only towards the end, lifting its spirits to another level.
It is a film that is almost like a literary work, creating its own world set in a specific time period and with a lot of subtle comments about the society made without entering into the main storyline.