You often hear that short stories make the best movies, as if the notion is to take something compact and widen it with cinema’s scalability. But the reverse can also be true: Certain movies benefit from feeling pocket-sized and unfettered, as if you’ve curled up with a tight, evocative short story, filled with just enough humor, detail and feeling to evoke a warm glow.
Set over two days during the instant relationship between a desperate young man from New York and a lonely older Los Angeles street musician, the black-and-white micro-indie “Burt” from director and co-screenwriter Joe Burke is one such half-slice of heart and calories, neither too much nor undercooked. You could watch a lot of films made with its equivalent budget (think that of a used 2007 sedan) and sense an ambition straining against constraints or a deliberate attempt at slumming. Not so with “Burt,” the movie equivalent of a cherry sour drop on a day when you need something a little tart, a tad sweet and that won’t outstay its welcome.
“Burt” stars Burt Berger as, well, Burt Berger, a 69-year-old troubadour type whom we first see in a sparsely attended coffeehouse plucking away at his guitar and, as if the ’60s never went away, singing about freedom. (Via Berger’s earnest, aged voice, the concept sounds hard-won.) Watching him intently is Sammy (co-screenwriter Oliver Cooper), who asks for a moment of Burt’s time. Over a picnic table in a field, this kind-eyed, spindly musician, visibly dealing with Parkinson’s, is informed that Sammy is the son he never knew he had. To which you might think: Finally, a movie that doesn’t waste time getting straight to what we’re already thinking.
Burt is tickled by the news and very quickly wants Sammy to stay overnight in the modest North Hollywood house he shares with his live-in landlord Steve (Steven Levy), a suspicious, rules-obsessed crank with mad-prophet facial hair, a nascent vegetable garden and, he’d like this new visitor to know, a gun. The distrust is mutual for Sammy, but he’s trying to stay focused on getting to know Burt for reasons that soon become apparent and which give this quirky, Jarmusch-inflected scenario an extra dab of seriocomic urgency.
But “Burt” isn’t driven by narrative. Director Burke is way more invested in the interpersonal dynamics of oddballs than anything else and, to that end, a fair amount of humorous tension is maintained — from Sammy’s fearful accommodation of Steve’s peculiarities to some contentious phone calls with a haranguing aunt (Caitlin Adams) who lives in a trailer park, is behind on rent and apparently makes a fine soup. Meanwhile, one of the more endearingly amusing aspects of “Burt” is how spiritedly the title character takes to sudden dadhood, especially his immediate adopting of such phrases as “No son of mine is …” and “That’s my boy!”
There’s no way for a general moviegoer to know what the ratio of fiction to nonfiction in is a scruffy DIY object like “Burt,” with characters playing versions of themselves. (If Levy doesn’t have an agent, he should consider it.) And while you don’t expect things to get sentimental, there’s a quiet faith as “Burt” shuffles along — its jazz-tinged music score a little rough and the editing not always smooth — that the movie won’t ignore the feelings its director has efficiently triggered. Most notably, Berger, whose life inspired the film, is a natural, easy to root for and an ideal center for a movie with a warmhearted view of life as best appreciated when you can set aside your hang-ups and adopt the occasional stray.
The post A micro-indie with a huge heart, ‘Burt’ tells a slender, stirring story of belated connection appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
