In Celebration of First Features :: John Sayles' "Return of the Secaucus 7"

I accept that some films aren't made for me - they don't speak to me about any kind of world I know or care to know, communicating an experience that maybe isn't completely foreign to me, but is certainly one that I don't need to subject myself to for two hours.

"Return of the Secaucus 7" is one of those movies.

That said, John Sayles was a graduate of Roger Corman's low-budget film production hothouse, and this was his 1978 feature debut (released in 1980). Reported as being shot in 25 days for $40,000, what can be gleaned from this inessential movie for a feature director today?

Like most low budget features from first time directors, this one leans heavily on dialogue and action is rare, which isn't a problem in itself. The biggest issue for me is that the characters all blur into each other. The film, for those who haven't heard about it, is about a group of friends who met through a web of random connections. They bonded during an arrest during a protest rally in New Jersey, and who have since become touchstones throughout each other's lives. They all congregate ten years after that jail cell incident in a small town in New Hampshire, and, well, not much else happens. Except I can't tell these people apart, except for their hairstyle.

Exhibit A ::


Part of the story is that these people are all so close that they present a hive mind, a united front, as elaborated through the introduction of an intimidated new boyfriend to the group (who is, by the way, quickly assimilated). I mean, what happens when you write scenes with people who all agree with each other? Not drama, that's for sure.

The dialogue doesn't sparkle like some of Sayle's later work, falling lifeless and awkward from the mouths of these less-than-stellar actors, although David Strathairn makes an early appearance here, limited as he is by the underdeveloped script.

But what really works here is the way Sayles handles this flaccid material in the edit. While his scenes are shot without dramatic arc or tension, Sayles gets around this by interweaving scenes, intercutting between conversations in a way that gives a sense of scope, a sense of a world that exists outside of the individual. This is especially helpful with scenes that have little or no coverage.

Letting these wordy scenes play out in one continuous shot would be torturous for the audience, and in many cases Sayles had no hinge shot to cut away to that would hide obvious jump cuts if he were to omit sections of dialogue. Cutting out of one of scene into other parallel scenes, however, not only gives Sayles the chance to trim his dialogue, but also to open up the claustrophobic framing into an interconnected network of tiny scenes that spread out like leaves on a pond, creating a larger dramatic canvas for the audience to appreciate. Like Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia," but without the sizzle.

This approach to handling, um... challenging material really hit home with me while watching "Altered States" by Ken Russell. Granted, the only thing these films have in common is the sheer volume and density of dialogue that's delivered in this film. But Russell does a great job of breaking up these slabs of difficult words into manageable chunks, by having the actors moving through the scene space while talking, or alternatively having the actors spread the scene across a number of "sub-scenes" - William Hurt, for example, follows Blair Brown from room to room while arguing the finer points of evolutionary biology and the benefits of isolation tanks - the first 1:34m of this embedded clip::



Each nugget of necessary information is isolated and dramatized in such a way that the audience gets the point before we move forward, and staged in such a way that energy and momentum is maintained throughout these long and detailed speeches.

Sayles, in a limited fashion, uses this strategy to great effect - the pace rarely languishes even though the drama limps and falters throughout. If he'd had a dramatic story arc to play out in this way the film would really have come alive. Perhaps in the end this film just doesn't have anything to say, and in that way is a reflection of it's time - hobbled by a kind of paralyzed nostalgia, like that found in "American Graffiti" or "The Big Chill." I don't think those kinds of films get made anymore, but if they do, they're not for me.