Rating
2.0

Note: I viewed George Gallo’s Local Color in Spring 2008 when I interviewed the writer/director for The Lumberjack. The film is having a limited release in New York, NY on Friday, July 3, and I figured now was an appropriate time to release my review. To read the interview, click here.

Local Color feels rather curiously like a made-for-TV movie, which is unfortunate because of writer/director/painter George Gallo’s real passion for his subject matter. The film is an utterly personal telling of the filmmaker’s first exploration into the art of landscape painting, and the dialogue and musical cues reflect the his sentimentality toward the story he is telling. The movie is a labor of love for Gallo, as he funded it through mostly fundraising and friend’s investment, and I wish I could say Local Color was a better film.

The story begins with John (Trevor Morgan), a high school student with an eye for painting and an overbearing father (Ray Liotta) who wants to squash it. He finds solace in his idol, an cantankerous artist by the name of Nicholai Seroff (Armin Mueller Stahl). At first, Seroff resists John’s requests for council, but after a few more visits and some proof of his talent, the recluse agrees to take the kid on as his protégé. The old man takes the “little shit” (as he likes to call him) to his summer home in the country, where the kid will learn the ways of landscape painting, and the old man will learn to open up his heart.

I could say more about the goings-on of the plot in the film, but the story is on complete autopilot. For a film about art, Local Color is a remarkably paint-by-numbers affair. Whether or not the movie accurately presents the events how they happened is irrelevant when the film offers nothing new to a story we’ve seen time and again. Even not-so-subtle jabs at contemporary artists and a brief appearance by Ron Perlman as a swishy art dealer can’t save the film from monotony. The performers do what they can with slanted dialogue, but only Mueller-Stahl comes out unscathed, while the rest simply clamor to make something out of nothing.

Local Color has heart, and that most certainly cannot be denied. The beautiful yet generic landscapes are punctuated by the emotive yet generic music. Morgan is often required to look thoughtfully off-camera in the picturesque way character’s like his are supposed to. But the schmaltziness feels artificial, and while those perfectly timed beats may seem correct to those who have experienced the tale being told, the audience merely yawns because there isn’t an original moment in Local Color.

2 stars