Product Description

Over the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the rural south are forced to confront a tangle of difficult choices in a decaying world. An ambitiously constructed, sensuously photographed meditation on adolescence, the first feature film by director David Gordon Green features breakout performances from an award-winning ensemble cast.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26484 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2002-03-12
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.com
George Washington is surely one of the most visually arresting debuts in recent American cinema. Loitering among the dilapidated machinery and detritus littering a small town in North Carolina, 24-year-old director David Gordon Green and cinematographer Tim Orr transform the listless confines of growing up poor into breathtaking beauty. Green has referenced Terence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) as an overriding influence, and the languorous grace of his portrait of childhood lives up to the comparison.

Tracing the interwoven stories of a group of kids, black and white, over a few pivotal days and one accidental death, Green elicits nuanced performances from a mostly nonprofessional cast and captures an understated poetry through clearly improvised dialogue. Where Harmony Korine's depiction of childhood outcasts in Gummo goes astray in its insistence upon depravity and shrill eccentricity, George Washington maintains a perfect balance between oddity, loosely configured realism, and the sublime. --Fionn Meade

From The New Yorker
David Gordon Green's languid, painterly film about a group of African-American kids growing up in rural North Carolina has all the deliberate, poetic rambling of a Terrence Malick picture. Its "Days of Heaven"-like voice-over, spoken by the thirteen-year-old actress Candace Evanofski, gives the film a haunting, ethereal structure that's far removed from the gritty narratives typically found in stories of poverty and desperation. The script is both evocative and richly detailed, and when the film turns unexpectedly violent the difficulty of bearing truthful witness to the actions of others is movingly, and convincingly, portrayed. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

amazing debut film
David Gordon Green has created a lush, vibrant film showing not just immense potential, but genuine talent. Set in the deep south during the recession of the 1980's, GW captures the melancholy of childhood in a rarely (if never before) seen light. While obviously influenced by the great talent of Terrence Malick, Green's choice of cinematographer and talent demonstrate a fundamental understanding of film as a visual and sensory medium, and not a dumping ground for rehashed dialogue and filler about bad relationships with witty quips. Green throws aside the usual bad dialogue and poor camera work of most first time film makers, and finds language in imagery and visuals in dialogue. The exploration of heroism and simple responsibility are given appropriate weight, but with no small sense of the absurd (perhaps appropriate when dealing with the perspective of children). This is an excellent film, and should stoke the drive of all wannabe or potential first-time film-makers. The bar need not be set low just because of a constrained budget. Films can be made that are meaningful and well-shot without a $100K budget.

A poignant landscape of a dusty, delapidated South
I saw this film at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2000, and thought it one of the most original and haunting films I have seen in years. It is a very subjective, impressionistic and almost transcendental movie about a group of kids, and how they follow their own particular code of honour in the face of misfortune. Kind of like Harmony Korine but at an easier pace, and with more unity of vision.

Hypnotic
In one of the opening scenes of George Washington, a boy and a girl break up. There is not much else to this scene, which makes it like most breaks ups. It makes it like many of our experiences is childhood: they just happen. The movie George Washington, however, mixes such everyday happenings in a poor, rural/industrial landscape with a level of complexity that is suprising and revealing. The characters experience love, loss, friendship, joy, forgiveness, boredom, and a longing for something more. The characters like each other. Some are white, and most of them are black, but they are all friends. Every summer, kids all over the country experience the kinds of events that many kids experience, yet there is a tragedy that occurs in this movie that renders this story unique. Tragedy aside, George Washington is simply a beautiful and quiet film about one hot summer in the south and it's children.