Commitments

“For me, it’s like your own church, your own belief,” asserts a man about to fish. “If you believe in something, believe in it. If you don’t believe in it, don’t believe in it.” he stands with a slight slouch, his cap cocked slightly to the side. The creek sounds all round him. “And the main thing is this,” he goes on, the camera in documentary 45365 pulling out to show his ample gut and his gear, hanging off his shoulder. “If you’re doing something you enjoy doing, and if your friends don’t ask you for anything you catch, you turn ‘em loose.” The music soundtrack shifts here, from twangy guitar to churchy organ as he concludes. “That’s why, most of the time I go home, I don’t take nothing with me. Not unless somebody asks me.”

The organ music continues, as the scene cuts to a basketball court, a patch of pavement in a park, shot from a distance, as kids play and observers discuss the latest story they’ve heard, someone’s been fighting, even busting a window. “The only reason they’re best friends,” jokes the speaker, “Is they’re the same height.” The scene cuts again, to the close confines of a bathroom, as a high school student paints her toenails and listens to her friend Cortney describe the difficulties of dating a boy who smokes cigarettes, who’s showing her “no respect or anything” as he won’t stop smoking around her. “When he called me,” she reports, the frame pitching between the girls, “‘He was like, ‘What if I don’t stop?’ And I was like, ‘Well then I can’t guarantee that I’ll stay with you.’”

Each of these snippets—scenes gleaned from the lives of citizens in Sidney, Ohio, whose zip code provides the film’s title—raises a question of commitment. For the fisherman, the ball players, and the girls, commitment is made up of decisions made each day. Prosaic or urgent, personal or collective, these decisions shape the community as you see it here.

The film is more than a little aware of your relationship to what you’re looking it. Even as it seems to be observational, and so, nonjudgmental and eclectic, it is also specific. Shot for shot, transition for transition, 45365 is itself a series of decisions, a show. (And, in the version appearing 14 December as part of PBS’ Independent Lens series, an abbreviated show at that, cut by some 40 minutes.) This much is underscored by the first scene, as the camera shoots from behind a man on a stage, looking out on empty seats, a lone trumpet on the soundtrack. Slightly abstract, slightly mournful, this image cuts to another sort of show, the view from a car cruising the street, no driver visible, just the windshield as frame, taking you past parked cars and low brick buildings, the radio jingle identifying your general location, in “the heart of the Ohio Valley.”

More specifically, Sidney is 40 miles north of Dayton on the Miami River. The brothers who shot the film, Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross, grew up there, and their appreciation is evident, their cameras finding bits of beauty everywhere—on the fishing creek, in parking lots and on sidewalks, in bleachers, on porches, and in retirement homes, at the 4H Club Horse Show and on the football field (and in the locker room, where the coach of the high school team, the Sidney Yellow Jackets, exhorts them to compete in “significant” late season games).

The film creates connections among these moments, partly by chronology (the film follows a seasonal arc) and partly by use of a familiar device, radio DJs who provide something like narration: here’s the Applefest, there’s the 4H Club Fair, and there’s Judge Don Luce, running for re-election. Music tracks on the radio help too, like “Baby Hold on to Me” or “I Only Have Eyes for You,” the last over haunting, lovely shots of a snowy start of winter, here the close of the film: snow plows, a kid spinning his car in a parking lot, snowflakes dancing in light. Repeated shots of trains and the distant sound of train whistles also pulls together what seem disparate images, of fireworks, parades, and football games.

Sometimes the chronology is evocatively rearranged, as when a couple just married appears under audio of their own vows, preparing for the wedding. Alan and Allison each gaze intently in his or her mirror, arranging a collar, putting on mascara. You’re hearing their immediate future and perhaps imagining what happens after that, as their faces reveal little, only the effort to make their faces right for the event. The hope embodied by this young couple is balanced by a man with a ponytail, declaring his love for his soul mate Peggy. They met, he says, shortly after he got out of prison, and “She’s got integrity, she’s very generous of all the women that I’ve met in my life.” The camera cuts back from a close-up to a two shot, and she smiles in the shadows nearby, nodding.

As the couple looks forward to their commitments, another scene shows a mother looking back, discussing the near future of her son with his lawyer. She leans back in her courtroom seat, he stands and leans toward her. Anticipating that the son will “get 11 to 12 months” in prison, the lawyer points out, “He’s been in a lot of trouble during his lifetime and that doesn’t help.” She sighs. The lawyer goes on, “He has some substance abuse issues… and putting him in a warehouse with bars on it isn’t going to help.” She nods. And she looks forward.