Starring Armin Mueller-Stahl, Trevor Morgan,
Samantha Mathis, Ron Perlman, and Ray Liotta
(Monterey Media/Alla Prima Productions)
Brushwork Pictures, 2009
“Don’t ever let anyone talk you out of what you want to do, who you want to be.”
—poet to painter
You are only young once: and in the film Local Color, a film about an art master and his student, an elderly man and one much younger, the young actor Trevor Morgan’s face, body, and manner capture the candor, confidence, fragility, hope, and humor of a time that cannot return. John, a boy becoming a man, is an artist looking for guidance, and as portrayed by Morgan, the beauty, health, and promise of that is vivid. Directed by George Gallo and inspired by his own youthful experience, Local Color is an intelligent and touching film, a tribute to friendship and to teaching, and a salute to both the past and the future. The film opens with scenes of nature, followed by close scrutiny of paintings; and we see a boy drawing in a gallery, mocked by a younger boy, praised by a young woman. Trevor Morgan’s John Talia is a young man whose father is ignorant of art, and suspicious of what such practice might mean (his son’s depictions of nude men is a particular concern, and the father, John Sr., approves of a school John wants to go to when John Sr. sees the attractive women also attending); but luckily, the mother, a seamstress, approves of, and identifies with, the boy’s talent. When an old, rotund art gallerist and framer, Yammi, tells the young man, John, about a local but famous artist, Nicholi Seroff, someone whose work and writing John is familiar with, John sees a direction worth pursuing. The place and time of the film are Port Chester, New York, 1974; and the story will take its characters and us to summer in Pennsylvania (but it was filmed in New Orleans and Covington, Louisiana).
Trevor Morgan plays John, and Armin Mueller-Stahl, an actor and visual artist, plays the tough elder artist Nicholi Seroff; and Charles Durning is the gallerist Yammi; Ray Liotta is John’s father; Diana Scarwid his mother, Edith; and Samantha Mathis, who has spoken of her character’s generational malaise, is a grieving poet, Carla, who lives near Seroff in Pennsylvania, sharing with Seroff the loss of a loved one (her son, his wife); and Ron Perlman is an art critic who likes abstract and experimental art, an acquaintance of Seroff. John visits the gruff, cursing Seroff and is rebuffed but returns and ingratiates himself. Nicholi Seroff says that feeling is the enemy of the elite, and that the common man knows bullshit and thus the elite of artists and critics rejects the presence of the common man; but that a journey shared is more important than a solitary journey. Seroff, who prefers representation art to abstract or conceptual work, sees John’s art, and thinks one of its limitations is that John is tell seeing through the eyes of other men, still imitating their effects. Surprisingly, Seroff invites John to accompany him on his summer vacation in rural Pennsylvania, a place where John will be able to see local color, things before they are affected by anything else. Yet, while John looks forward to art lessons, Seroff is giving to eating and drinking and having John repair the house. The time in Pennsylvania becomes as much as lesson in life as in art: attention, dedication, discipline, friendship, love, and sacrifice are cultivated. John learns the different sides of both character and color.
Nicholi Seroff’s acquaintance Curtis Sunday, an art critic, thinks representational art is safe and shallow symbolism, but John notes that it is not appreciated and popular and, consequently, seems to John far from safe. (Obviously competent, Seroff’s work is not as expressive on film as his argument or John’s is compelling.) The film offers a reminder that when most people are celebrating the new, the new is no longer radical, or even particularly new—it has become conformity, whether in painting, music, literature, or film. In Local Color, the critic and established but neglected artist have great Sunday night meals and raucous talks, which Sunday’s wife Sandra (Julie Lott) and now John attend. Seroff insists on the centrality of feeling, and when the critic asks him to be a judge at a county art fair, then Seroff seeing mechanics, a mannequin, a one-color painted canvas, and an amateur scream painting presented as art, all part of a struggle of sanity against madness in which madness is winning, a rebellious Seroff awards the prize to a practical item, a working, tall painted-yellow floor fan. The worst (or best) of this occurs later, when Seroff shows the critic some work and the critic is impressed by the complexity, depth, feeling, minimalism, purpose, and secondary thought evident in the work—and the revelation of the origin of the work produces hysterical laughter in all, particularly in Sunday’s own wife. Seroff has proved his point about the emptiness of certain aesthetic theories, but being right is little help in a world in which “No one cares. The world is too ugly.” The old painter has lost faith, but the young man rekindles it, and Seroff begins to teach John in earnest about working habits, observation of nature, and use of colors. It is a lovely film.
