Rich Hill tracks three teenagers’ struggles

The Baltimore opening of acclaimed indie documentary Rich Hill premiered at Creative Alliance, a community arts space, on Nov. 12. The film, which played first at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, won Sundance’s U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary Award and has since garnered accolades from national news sources and local film festivals alike.

Rich Hill tracks the lives of three teenage boys over the course of a year as they struggle to navigate adolescence in a 1,393-person rural Missouri town from which the film draws its name. Although the boys — Appachey (12), Andrew (13), and Harley (15) — have disparate obstacles and are not friends with one another, the boys all share backgrounds of crippling poverty and unstable family life.

The film opens with a series of shots that set the scene: a town that could be any pastoral American locale. A tractor plows through an open field, the high school hallways are wide and bustling; cheerleaders practice for an upcoming game; a train whistles past; the homes are small and quaint; and a diner switches its sign to “open.”

The only absence in this quintessential American rural town is a sense of stable establishments. Throughout the film, it is never revealed where the grocery or department stores are located. Thus, this leads the audience to believe that these essential places do not exist in the town, or if they do, they are few and far between. A dramatic, instrumental score accompanies the footage throughout, setting a tone of anticipation.

The audience is first introduced to Andrew, a smiling, All-American youth interested in faith and football. Andrew’s unbreakable hope for the future despite his family’s economic woes sets him apart from the other boys, and it leads the audience to believe that he could succeed past his hardships. He is the only boy who has what could be described as a classic nuclear family — he lives with his father, mother and twin sister.

Nevertheless, Andrew experiences instability and difficult times as his father bounces from odd job to odd job and the family is routinely forced to move due to a lack of economic options. Andrew often helps his father with manual labor jobs, earning $20 a day, and he remains unfazed by the situation even when his family has to heat water for baths manually or temporarily live in their cousins’ home.

Unlike Andrew, Harley is not full of unwavering optimism. Harley is the eldest boy featured in the documentary, and he is living with his grandmother while his mother is in prison. Despite her absence, Harley and his mother maintain a close relationship, speaking weekly on the phone and writing each other letters.

Harley is plagued with anger management problems that spring from a hideous past incident, and he struggles with truancy. His grandmother is supportive and understanding despite Harley’s flaws. She’s attentive to his anger and medication, and the audience cannot help but sympathize with her because Harley’s rage can be quite extreme at times. Their home is well-furnished, and his grandmother does all she can to provide for him on her tight budget.

Like Harley, Appachey also experiences bouts of rage along with a slew of behavioral and mental disorders including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. Appachey’s aggressive behavior extends to school where he’s bullied by his classmates and responds with violence. However, his sole interests are skating and moving to China so that he can become an artist and paint dragons all day.

In one of the first scenes introducing Appachey, he is seen coming home, lighting a cigarette on a toaster and discussing how his father walked out on him when he was six years old. He speaks in a precocious manner that makes the viewer forget he is only 12. His mother is also very involved in the film, opening up about her struggles as a young, single parent and the difficulties she has experienced raising Appachey.

Rich Hill provides a truly intimate look at poverty in America through the scope of three boys’ lives. At times the viewer takes on a voyeuristic position, such as when watching Appachey and his mom fight through a window. The audience witnesses troubling moments that typically only close family member would be privy to.

The viewer is, at times, almost uncomfortably entangled in the struggles of each family, and it can be startling to see how intimately these families allow strangers into their world.

Rich Hill gives viewers insight into America’s deepening economic disparity and the current and future generations that are most impacted by issues of poverty and social class.

The filmmakers, first cousins Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo, chose the town Rich Hill to serve as their subject matter as they are both closely connected to the area. Palermo was born in Missouri, and Tragos’s father grew up in Rich Hill, where she spent many summers. Their grandparents were established, well-loved members of the Rich Hill community. Their grandmother was a grade school teacher while their grandfather served as the town’s grocer and mail carrier. The filmmakers stumbled upon their subjects by chance and used their knowledge of the town to build relationships with the boys and their families.

Although the film highlights three complex families, at times the plot lines and background are a bit underdeveloped. It remains unclear how these families’ socioeconomic situations relate to the wealth of the town as a whole. Rich Hill is clearly a poor, former coal-mining town, but it is unclear if all of its residents struggle as Andrew, Appachey and Harley do or if these boys are particularly worse off.

In the beginning of the film, Andrew says, “People walk past us with their nose 50 miles in the air acting like they’re better than us, and I don’t fall for that. We’re not trash. We’re good people.” While this quote is incredibly poignant and telling of the film as a whole, it fails to define exactly who these “people” are: Are they other members of the community or outsiders from more prosperous towns?

Lesser plot aspects remain shrouded in mystery as well. Andrew’s mother suffers from a severe medical or mental health condition that causes her to stay in bed while her son wishes that she could go outside and experience life as he does. However, it’s never clarified whether she suffers from depression, agoraphobia, crippling insomnia, a medication addiction or something else entirely. This lack in specificity could be due to the family’s wishes or a lack of access to healthcare that could provide a finite diagnosis.

Out of all of the boys, Appachey remains the most underdeveloped. He comes off as one-sided and not particularly likeable, and audiences have to struggle to grapple with his violent attitudes toward his classmates and his younger siblings. The viewer wants to believe that he is not a bad kid but rather one who has been a victim of bad circumstances; however, there seems to be little evidence to prove it. The filmmakers portray him as one-dimensional, leaving the viewer to believe that there is more of his story to be told.

Rich Hill, like its characters, is a film that can be hard to swallow. When introducing it, Creative Alliance Managing Director Gina Caruso mentioned how most theaters do not show the film because it is hard to market. Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly a film worth seeing for any viewer interested in American issues of socioeconomic disparity that are discussed daily yet not always readily visible.

Since its production, the film has aided the boys who courageously chose to star in it. A Bates County Victim’s Rights Advocate watched Rich Hill and subsequently arranged for Harley to visit his mother in prison, and the filmmakers have started a successful ongoing Rally.org fundraiser for the families involved.