A 'Consuming' Portrait Of Appalachian Life
Earl Gray is about the closest thing to a celebrity that the small Appalachian town of Magguson has. In Chris Sullivan's debut animated feature, Consuming Spirits, Gray (Robert Levy) hosts a gardening show on the local radio station, and the occasional event around town.
His commentary tends to start practical, morph into poetic reveries, and then become impassioned — sometimes aggressive or despairing rants. His gravelly voice and edge-of-sanity delivery call to mind an alternate-universe Garrison Keillor after a career-long bender of whiskey, cigarettes and disappointment. One caller to his show asks about using the ashes from a trash-burning bonfire as garden fertilizer; Gray recommends against it, calling them the "bitter remains of charred memories."
That phrase might well be applied to Sullivan's emotionally raw, thoroughly original film as well, a labor of painstaking (and, one suspects, pain-exorcising) love 15 years in the making. Sullivan incorporates autobiographical details from a childhood heavily influenced by social services intervention, and from that seed springs a story about the fallout of broken homes, poverty, alcoholism and mental illness in small-town America.
He tells that story in an experimental stew of animation styles, using stop-motion miniatures for establishing shots, multilayered moving cutouts for the primary action, surrealist pencil sketches for dreams and memories, and occasional animated newsprint clippings thrown into the mix as well.
The effect is that of disjointed, haunted reverie, of alternate realities colliding, soundtracked by mumbled asides and an uneasy murmur of background noise. Gray's story intersects with that of Gentian Violet (Nancy Andrews) and Victor Blue (Sullivan), a sad-sack pair of middle-aged lovers who work in the paste-up department of the local newspaper, play together in a traditional Irish music duo, and steal kisses at Violet's house when they can get away from her mother — who suffers from dementia and is prone to wildly inappropriate sexual comments and attending dinner in the nude.
Christopher Sullivan/Film Forum
Earl Gray is a local radio and paper personality, notorious for his program and column, "Gardeners Corners."