Voyage of Time
I have been sitting in front of my computer for a long time now trying to figure out a way to articulate my feelings towards All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, a film that has been generating great acclaim ever since it premiered last January at the Sundance Film Festival, and I confess that I am at a loss. Here is a film that has a lot going for it—it is a bold and ambitious exercise in personal filmmaking from writer-director Raven Jackson, making her feature debut, that defies most of the rules of conventional filmmaking and it contains moments of formal beauty that are almost astonishing to behold. And yet, even though these are all traits that I normally embrace in a movie, I never quite managed to connect with the material on any kind of real emotional level.
The film is essentially a series of non-linear vignettes offer us glimpses into the life of Mack, a Black woman from a small Mississippi town, from her childhood (where she is played by Kaylee Nicole Johnson) to adulthood (where she is played by Charleen McClure). Among the others features in these moments are her father (Chris Chalk), who more or less represents the passing of knowledge and history from one generation to the next, her mother (Sheila Atim), an undeniably striking figure whose influence in Mack’s life is tragically cut short, and her sister Josie (by Jayah Henry and Moses Ingram). Another key character is Wood, who is first seen as Mack’s childhood crush (played then by Preston McDowell) and whom she reunites with as an adult (Reginald Helms Jr.).
As the story moves back and forth in time, it becomes obvious that the film is less a conventional narrative and more of a mood piece, one that happens to be particularly interested in the sight of Mack and the way that she touches everything that she encounters as a way to suggest her need to connect with the world around her. At first, this is both visually spectacular (especially as captured via the luminous 35MM cinematography by Jomo Fray) and intriguing from a narrative standpoint, especially during the beautiful extended opening sequence that finds Mack’s dad teaching her how to fish. The problem is that Jackson essentially repeats this concept throughout the film without ever figuring out a way to make them into a story that serves as anything more than a series of pretty pictures—even though many things happens to Mack over the course of the film (including the death of a parent and the destruction of her home by fire), Jackson presents them in such an emotionally opaque manner that they hardly seem to register with Mack, let alone the audience.
Because of its reliance on sumptuous imagery to tell its story over more traditional forms of advancing the stories, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt will no doubt invite comparisons to the likes of such filmmakers as Terrence Malick and Julie Dash. On the surface, those comparisons may be apt but those filmmakers, at least in their finest works, also had a sense of narrative drive that, while unique, kept their films from becoming just a series of pretty pictures. At this point, Jackson does not quite have that drive—at least not enough to sustain an entire feature—and because of that, her film becomes just a series of lovely images (which, with their emphasis on hands caressing things and the backs of heads, get fairly repetitive after a while) that never quite hit the level of transcendence that she is clearly aiming for right from the start.
As a result, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt never quite clicked with me in the way that it clearly has with many others. To these eyes, it is the work of someone who clearly has all the gifts to become an extraordinary filmmaker but has not quite figured out yet how to corral them into something genuinely meaningful. Still, it is a work of undeniable ambition from a director with a lot of promise and even though I cannot really recommend it to anyone, I will say that if what I have written about it intrigues you on some level, you might want to consider seeking it out for yourself because perhaps it will hit you with more force than it did me.