Film

No Redemption

Levity Eases the Burden of Violence

by Bradley Steinbacher

dir. Ed Solomon

Opens Fri April 11 at various theaters.

Ed Solomon is an exceptionally soft-spoken man whose Hollywood resumé, which includes writing Men in Black and co-writing Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, seems to contradict his nature. His directorial debut, Levity, is another contradiction of his previous work, exploring not alien bugs or time-traveling dunderheads but hope and redemption, and the question of whether someone who has committed a crime--in this case, murder--can find, and even deserves to find, both.

Billy Bob Thornton stars at Manuel Jordan, a man who reluctantly finds himself released from prison after serving 20 years for killing a teenage gas-station clerk. A husk of a human, Manuel spends his first free nights merely wandering the streets, but is eventually brought together with a shady preacher named Miles Evans (Morgan Freeman) whose church sits across the street from a popular dance club. Miles' scheme: Free, secure parking for the clubgoers if they sit through 15 minutes of his sermon. Manuel takes a job at the church and slowly, almost against his will, begins to scrape together a life.

Enter Adele Easely (Holly Hunter), the sister of the teenage clerk Manuel murdered two decades before. A single mother with a troubled teenager of her own, Adele has no idea who Manuel really is, which enables him to semi-stalk her. He offers at first to carry her groceries home from the market, which leads to flowers and a dinner date. Lonely and barely getting by, Adele opens her life to him. A wary friendship is born, creating a tenuous opening for Manuel to find some sort of redemption. Levity's trick, however, is that redemption never really materializes.

"I was trying to write about alienation and detachment, and about a kind of longing to be part of the human race, a longing to have value as a person," Ed Solomon says of his helming debut--and in this regard, Levity is entirely successful. A small, quiet film, with beautifully frigid cinematography by Roger Deakins, it may not be remarkable, but it can affect you nonetheless. None of the characters in Levity achieve complete closure, and probably none of them will ever find true happiness. In the end, however, all they can hope is for the burden of their violent pasts to be lifted from their shoulders.