America’s Heart & Soul (2004)

Director Louis Schwartzberg once ran a film stock library, Energy, and spent a number of years documenting “life” in the U.S. And so, some images in America’s Heart & Soul may be familiar to those who watch nicely photographed television shows or films on PBS. The footage of Bandaloop, for example, the California-based dance company that uses harnesses and tethers to create dance pieces as they repel off mountains, is sometimes identical to what appeared in a piece about the artists on CBS’ Sunday Morning. The same might be said for shots of Erik Weihenmayer, the blind mountain climber who has scaled Everest and other great peaks, as he appeared in the documentary, As Far as the Eye Can See.

More a collection of portraits than a documentary, America’s Heart & Soul owes what little originality it has to its many subjects, whose vigorous work, play, and vision may make you wonder why you spend so much time sitting on your ass. These lives glimpsed seem spiritual, fulfilling, productive, or just plain fun, but what is most compelling is their purity. Clichés perhaps, but sometimes simplicity and familiarity communicate powerful sentiments — like pride, in one’s community, in triumph over adversity, in maintaining a vanishing way of life.

The film boasts sumptuous photography and a range of locations: mist rising off a sleepy valley or rain falling on a tired industrial town, the grandeur of Manhattan’s skyline. Such inspiring backdrops are just that, however, for portraits of inspiring figures. One thrilling sequence follows Rick and Dick Hoyt, the father-son Boston Marathon team who have competed every year for over a decade. Rick has cerebral palsy, and his father pushes him in his chair. Less sensationally poignant is a section on Waltham, a crowd-pleasing rock band named after a town in Massachusetts, who sing pop songs about girls and work day jobs, as cab drivers or factory employees. Another group, the Vasquez Brothers, form an energetic salsa dance company in Los Angeles, filmed amid gorgeous colorful neon, whose languid sensuality is a perfect counterpoint to their frenetic moves.

The film contrasts such impressive talents with interview subjects whose arts are less obviously valuable, encouraging viewers, perhaps, to contemplate how value is conferred, and how meaning might be inscribed. The film includes interviews with an Appalachian rug weaver; Yac Yacobellis, a Manhattan bike messenger so devoted that he races bikes in his spare time; West Virginia steel workers struggling to keep their lives together; a soulful jazz trumpeter in New Orleans who passes his art on to his younger brother and the neighborhood kids.

The contrasts between rural and urban, rich and poor, gritty and bucolic, lend a kind of tension. California vintner Ed Holt lists the small yet significant things that make up his life: the climatic changes that can make or break a harvest, his love of the wine he makes, the fact that he rarely, if ever, leaves his grapes. In Chicago, Olympic boxer Michael Bennett, who spent seven years in prison, now works at a local gym, trying to keep boys off the streets by encouraging their interest in boxing. Ennui is not only a problem in the city: Vermont dairy farmer George Woodard is raising his young son (every other weekend); though he went to college to study business, he explains that he decided to return to the family business, and now is trying his hand at amateur filmmaking. A more famous Vermonter named Ben makes ice cream. We all know Ben and Jerry are rich and famous Vermonters, but yes, they started out as ordinary Americans with a dream, who failed miserably until they got it right.

If none of these careers is earth-changing, America’s Heart & Soul suggests that each is premised on a love of craft and appreciation for a way of life. It also poses a central question: what can these portraits tell us about connections in an enormously diverse nation? After observing this richly colored pageant of people, U.S. audiences might emerge with a renewed perspective, one that celebrates defiant individuality over bland patriotism. Still, the film includes corny epigraphs between sections — “Freedom lives in the soul” — undermine the subjects’ creativity. Why not let these people speak for themselves?

It might have been worse: instead of celebrating the individuality and “indomitable human spirit” so often attributed to the U.S., Schwartzberg might have decided to go all jingoistic. America’s Heart & Soul does remind us that no single ideology or way of life defines America. We are where we live, we are what we do. Choosing (or being compelled by circumstances) to live or work outside of the ever-burgeoning, brand-name, strip mall culture is, the film suggests, one way of preserving a sense of individuality.