(IMAGE: Death Letter Blues stars Ramsay Midwood, Karole Foreman, and Sherman Augustus)
A sharp bit of southern Gothic storytelling with a dash of magical realism, Death Letter Blues makes for a sweaty, sultry mystery/drama full of soul-searching and seething over – the nature of us – good and bad. But mostly bad. And, what will our judgment be?
In a small Mississippi town, a young boy is found wandering in the woods. Naked, unkempt, and unschooled, the child becomes known as the Feral Boy. The local clergyman, Father Moss (Sherman Augustus – Stranger Things), is brought in to advocate for the child. Rather than have him taken into the custody of the State, he approaches a local couple (older and childless), Ed (Ramsay Midwood) and Marcy (Karole Foreman), and suggests that taking in the feral boy might give them the opportunity to have the family they never did – or perhaps the family they lost.
Some years later, the feral boy is a teenager, his origins still unknown; Ed and Marcy have raised him as their own. He’s a nice boy with a couple of friends, Riley and Pete (Arianna Ngnomire and Justine Robinson – both very natural performers), and some issues, as one might expect. When he gets into trouble for biting another student, we quickly discern it’s not his first incident when the principal suggests it may be time for “…homeschooling,” a notion that Marcy and Ed find offensive given the behavior of the towns’ more “…favored children.” This is a nod to the socioeconomic and racial dynamics long at work in the community. As it happens, Ed and the Feral Boy are white – Marcy is not. Not long after the incident at the school, Feral Boy is found dead after a high school party in the woods. How this came to be is the first mystery of the film, a tale laid out slow and methodically, with narrative asides and moments to ponder the question at hand as well as southern skies full of storm clouds on the move. This is Southern Gothic storytelling, and writer-directors Strack Azar and Michael Stevantoni (despite their youth) seem to be old hands at the form. Southern natives with close relations in the community, their sense of colloquial language, and the languid pace of things and people (much of the cast is from the community) are evident and well applied. They even get the cicadas right. In addition to all the classic elements of southern Gothic storytelling (dreams and parables), they add that touch of magical realism in the form of what looks like God’s classical wrath, including those southern summer skies, full of dark storm fronts rolling in and all that entails. It works literally and metaphorically.
Meanwhile, our Father Moss, who has since lost an eye to a tumor and developed questions of his own about faith, fate, and judgment, is drawn into a second mystery – more of a conundrum, actually, when a noted citizen dies. The man leaves the Father a red Jaguar and a letter confessing a horrible crime committed some 50 years ago. What will the Father do with this information? How in a world where a boy can be left in the woods to fend for himself and then be killed and have no one come forward to tell what they know – can this 50-year-old crime count for anything? All this while he’s having a literally steamy affair (Mississippi in the summer) with the local waitress, Jo, played by the excellent Kelyor Leigh with down-home charm and wisdom.
Aside from pondering the question of – and investigating – what happened to the Feral Boy, Father Moss is struggling with the act of bringing the child into Ed and Marcy’s life all those years ago if it was destined to bring them so much pain. A madding pain, which in Marcy’s case, is starting to show. How could this be God’s will? How could this seemingly good man get away with an evil thing (if only one) and still get to live his long successful life, loved and revered – while a Boy whose name no one really knows can be left on the road to die with no one held to account? Or, as the film postulates, will we all be held to account, eventually, if not one by one, for our individual sins, perhaps old testament style, by the wrath of the Almighty, who knows all our secrets and calls everyone to account – eventually.
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