After America
NARRATIVE FILMSCompleted mere days before George Floyd’s death, After America is a confounding mosaic of stories taking place in and around Minneapolis. Does it have anything to do with Floyd or the COVID pandemic? Not really. Some might find this misleading considering Floyd is mentioned in the majority of the film’s marketing material.
Instead, the film sets out to be an intimate and anecdotal journey, more about moments and the long silences in between instead of plot points and unfolding drama. The bulk of the story follows the parallel lives of six people. There is Theresa (Theresa McConnon), a woman who is suffering an undefined mental illness and would prefer homelessness instead of living with her aspiring actor husband, Dan (Daniel Nies). There is Yvette (Yvonne Frese), a woman recently dumped by her boyfriend who is trying to find meaning in her life by taking whip cracking lessons. There is Ahmed (Ahmed Yusuf), a teacher who is struggling to write his own memoirs, and Eric (Dan Fox), a young deaf man who poses for suggestive photographs and is seeking hook-ups. There is also a maintenance man in the mix, Wayne (Eli Anthony) who crosses paths with Theresa while working in a closed down mall.
There are aspects of After America that are astounding considering its medium. Most of the featured performers aren’t professional actors, but de-escalation workers who help educate police on dealing with mental health or disabilities through live workshopping. This is how the film begins, shot in a fly-on-the-wall documentary style, but everything else that follows is improvised fiction. That is both the strength and weakness of the film; without the security of a script, forcing the actors to lean on others who are playing out different stories, the results are bound to be mixed. The timeline that holds them together gets harder to discern.
Perhaps the most impressive performance in the story belongs to McConnon who has never acted onscreen before and has an established two-decade career in social work and criminal justice. Her story bookends the film and has a desperateness and poignancy that the others struggle to find, although there is little to glean over what has led to her mental state or her decision-making. The other characters prove to be just as opaque, although Anthony brings some weight to the scenes with his real life mother (Brooke Anthony) who he cares for both on and off the job.
In the end, After America is hampered by its shortcomings. When each individual story is broken down, it feels incomplete, and when knitted together, they don’t work as a whole. Characters are introduced without names, context, backstories and, in some cases, without an established setting. With time, the interest level concerning individual stories varies as well; some get much more screen time and dialogue compared to others. For a film that aims to be about ‘real-life struggles to escape the pressures of the American Dream,’ the outcome is much more general: life isn’t easy for anyone. By the time it’s over, you will see a lot but you may struggle to connect, regardless of how much or how little you know about the people onscreen.