The Power of Small Acts of Kindness in ‘The King of New Orleans’

“This is the job I like. This is me,” New Orleans cab driver Larry shirt says. And for 81 minutes The King of New Orleans cruises along, with you a voyeur as he goes from fare to fare in this low-budget indie flick. It doesn’t matter where you’re going — Larry is the main reason to take this ride.

Larry (character actor David Jensen) is the kind of everyday hero that’s relevant in a post-2016-election USA. He tries to be tolerant, polite, and understanding. He may bite his tongue or shake his head, but he doesn’t openly judge any of the people who get into his cab, and his passengers include hustlers, tourists, socialites, ex-cons, musicians, housekeepers, reporters, and residents trying to decide whether to evacuate when Hurricane Katrina bears down on them. Whether his passengers lean politically left or right, or they’re too confused to choose, it doesn’t matter. Larry accepts people on their own terms.

Larry keeps a cooler filled with food and beer that he shares with passengers, though he’s quick to explain that the beer is strictly for them — he’s not drinking and driving. He also has a tendency to act like Dr. Phil with those who are rudderless enough to need or request advice. Even when his patience is sorely tested by tourists who hire him so they can snap photos of the hurricane devastation, when they ask him to step out of his cab and take a photo of them posing in front of an abandoned house, Larry calmly cooperates. That’s because Larry is like a bartender. Listening and trying to understand people is part of his job — though it’s clear that he enjoys hearing people’s stories and trying to help them.

The King of New Orleans is a slice-of-life film shot in cinema-vérité fashion, with a heavy reliance on jarring jump cuts and a hand-held or dashboard camera giving it a documentary feel. It substitutes anticipation of what kind of passenger will open the cab door next for traditional plotting, but some of the conversations seem more natural (and therefore believable) than others. Among his fares is Bobby Cohn (Richard Brien), a college student home from school who is in the middle of a personal crisis. Kicked out of Harvard, Bobby has to find a way to tell his parents and decide where to go and what to do next.

If this were a mainstream film, you’d see the full trajectory of a developing relationship between Bobby and Larry. But it’s not, and in true indie style, King of New Orleans directors Allen Frederic, Coodie Simmons, and Chike Ozah choose to keep Bobby an incidental part of Larry’s life — just one of many passengers he interacts with. Unlike the others, however, Bobby does cross paths with Larry several times, and those intersections help shape the narrative. So does the jazzy, evocative music that Mike Bass offers as a rich reminder that you’re in the Big Easy, and the musical interludes especially kick in when Larry is parked by the Mississippi River gazing at the skyline.

Mike Scott of The Times Picayune called The King of New Orleans among the “best truly independent dramas to come out of New Orleans in recent memory.” A New Orleans resident would know. It’s certainly one of the more authentic indie flicks I’ve seen lately. These days even indie flicks seem to be getting funded from multiple sources, which, combined with the easy accessibility of HD cameras, has made it harder to tell an indie film from mainstream. Collectively they’re looking slicker than ever, so when a film like this comes along you’re reminded of the raw honesty of independent filmmaking, where there’s no pressure to pander to audiences to guarantee a box office return.

In the absence of any fully developed relationships and with no real dramatic arc to speak of — even the hurricane is downplayed, compressed into a 46-second montage — Larry’s daily interactions are the big takeaway. In fact, you could say that The King of New Orleans is a cinematic argument for offering small acts of kindness in our daily lives,

It’s a far from perfect film, though. Jensen does a good job of making us want to ride along with Larry, but the no-frills, voyeuristic camerawork and screenplay really don’t offer enough variety to combat the nagging real-time feeling of being in a cab hour after hour and day after day. Without much plot other than the episodic repetition of fares and friends and questions about their problems, you really appreciate the change of pace when Larry gets out of his cab and spends a little down-time in bars and at barbeques with friends in their pre- and post-Katrina worlds.

Though the film is set up to highlight the interaction between Larry and Bobby Cohn, his relationship with good friend Dom (Zaria Griffin) is deeper and the conversations more natural and inviting. The men have a history that lurks tantalizingly between the spoken lines, whether they’re alluding to a deceased family member or talking about small topics that seem large to them, like the NFL Saints. The King of New Orleans is most successful when it sticks to understated narratives and small moments. Larry is by nature such a low-key guy that when he finally unleashes a sudden, gale-force outburst at Bobby, it seems overly dramatic and out-of-character — a single forced moment in a film that had successfully sidestepped them, otherwise.

The King of New Orleans falls somewhere between 6 and a 7 on PopMatters‘ rating scale, but in the spirit of small kindnesses I’m rounding up. Larry talks people off ledges so often that those people probably blur for him, though Bobby will remember Larry for the rest of his life. That’s the way small kindnesses work.

The King of New Orleans is closed captioned and presented in 16×9 widescreen, with 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround sound. There are no bonus features, and while it’s not rated, the film would merit an R for language.