How do you counter the “deaths of despair?” In a world that often cares little for those who are struggling, what systems and communities can we build to break people free from the grip of addiction? Can these inevitably imperfect structures hold the weight of so much suffering without letting people slip through the cracks?
These are the questions at the heart of Adam Meeks’ moving and measured feature directorial debut “Union County.” A film of deep compassion and crushing pain, it looks a broken America squarely in the face. It doesn’t provide easy answers for people working to heal, as they already know none exist, and instead provides a more restrained yet no less riveting reflection on how people are working to build a better world for themselves and others.
Starring a never-better Will Poulter as Cody, an Ohio man setting out on the long road to recovery, the film is an extension of Meeks’ more narrowly focused short of the same name; it expands in scope while maintaining the same attention to detail and care for character. Using nonprofessional actors from a real county-mandated drug court program, the film keeps an eye turned towards the hard realities of life and cuts all the deeper because of it, eschewing narrative convention to immerse us more fully in the lived experiences of those trying to rebuild their lives.
Well acted, written and directed work, the film proves most impactful when it feels less like a movie than a window on the lives of people our frequently uncaring world would rather look away from. Meeks does not, finding the quiet moments of beauty in his subjects’ lives as they work their way back from addiction. Their work is often defined by pain and setback, though the greatest moments of salvation can come from the simplest of places.
Such salvation is initially hard to see for Cody. At the beginning of “Union County,” he’s attending a meeting of a court-ordered drug program, though he doesn’t seem to be fully invested in it. Meeks uses pointedly unbroken and extended takes to capture the proceedings, which are disrupted when Cody’s foster brother and fellow addict, Jack (Noah Centineo), comes careening in like he has been shot out of a cannon.
The two men could not be more different, but they’re both trying to hold onto their bond, fractured as it will become. As Meeks and cinematographer Stefan Weinberger take us into the rhythms of their lives, the film’s visual language uses focused rather than flashy framing that almost makes the movie feel like a documentary.
Where other films about addiction can feel exploitatively frenetic, “Union County” lets entire scenes play out as they seem to be happening. We sit and watch life as it is for the subjects, getting to know them just as they try to reinvent themselves.
Everything is authentically rendered, whether it is the man bantering at a new job, eating a quiet lunch together, working in the program or finding themselves on the cusp of relapsing. Even in a moment when stillness is upended by a moment of catastrophe, the change takes place slowly and subtly before rapidly accelerating.
At every turn, the film earns every emotional, lived-in development, instilling this slice-of-life portrait with such a quiet humanity that it can feel like you’re sitting at the tables and in the meeting rooms along with all the characters. Even when Poulter’s character is saying few if any words, you feel his guilt, his pain, his joy, and his determination to find his way back to himself, no matter how long it takes.
The question then remains, how do you counter deaths of despair? As life is not like the movies, it won’t come in just a single feature film’s worth of work. But in this captivating, compassionate cinematic portrait of the people spending their lives helping themselves and others begin to heal, we see where life may start again.
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