By Glenn Dunks
Sometimes you just know. You can just feel it. You know? When a film isn’t just good, or even great, but one that will percolate in your mind for ages. When it offers that true gut feeling you get when watching something that just sings to every part of you. And so it is with the docu-fiction curio whatsit Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets from directing brothers Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross which is set in a Vegas dive bar —bear with me, I think this is accurate—that is actually a stand-in for a New Orleans dive bar of the same name populated with real life people, some of whom have acted although none of whom would call themselves actors (maybe), They represent real life personalities who have come together to mourn the triumph of capitalism that isn’t really happening.
I know, I know, I’m lost too, but what a way to get lost! It’s like Robert Altman making an episode of Cheers if he gave his cast an open bar and its theme song was Sophie B. Hawkins’ “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover”...
For all intents and purposes, the Ross Brothers’ film, something of a buzzy sensation at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, is a documentary. It’s certainly presented as such and if you didn’t know about its creation you would probably have no reason to believe it weren't real. It’s the story of a Vegas bar’s closing night with a future as a CVS advertising Celine Dion concerts ahead of it. The night is a big farewell for those who spent many a drunken night (and day) there, good timers and drunks and sex workers that populate the streets off the main strip. An 18-hour wake for a place that is more of a home for many of its patrons than their homes.
From the camaraderie between the Roaring 20s’ patrons to the reflections of its camera crew in the bar’s reflective mirror backdrop; I almost wish I wasn’t privy to the reality of their reality. And in discussing it here, it is robbing one of the purity of experiencing the film. But it’s important to note that the film isn’t exactly non-fiction in the traditional sense.
But what is tradition, anyway? The brothers have concocted their own bartender’s special cocktail, a film that stings at the back of the throat for while it may be fictional at least in sense that the film is not a document of a real bar’s real closing night with real patrons, it is very real in the complex emotions it unearths, the acidic relationships it carves, and the way it tells a story of contemporary America better than most directors do with actors and dialogue. It’s looks better than them, too, with its neon and fluorescent buzz highlighting the sunken, marked faces of its subjects. They probably had to make the movie this way because Harry Dean Stanton died in three years ago.
Like many a long haul in a grimy bar off main, the night turns tender, raucous, political, violent, funny and sombre. There are loudmouths and quiet ones like the army veteran who eventually breaks down into tears at the way people like himself and those in the bar are treated by society. The patrons are a mix of race and gender, identity and nationality (as an Australian I truly felt the line, “What kind of party is it if an Australian doesn’t take his pants off?”). They discuss the concept of goodbyes and family—as Michael, a failure and then an alcoholic, says, “I’m somebody you hang out with at a bar, I’m not family”, signposting the very real bonds that had clearly begun to form with these people in the three-day experiment.
And I guess that’s what Bloody Noses, Empty Pockets is: an experiment. No, it’s not the real story of a beloved bar’s final day (for that maybe check out last year’s What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire, although even that one has elements of… unreality). It may be populated by people on the fringes, some of whom turn to grog to retreat from a world that has treated them worse than most, but what it illuminates is something extremely real. As the bar TV unfolds with episodes of Jeopardy, infomercials and The Misfits as the jukebox shuffles everywhere from Michael Jackson and Kenny Rogers to the aforementioned “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” over a beautiful, euphoric sequence that plays in romantic close-up and cold CCTV, the hours pass and any concerns over theoretical ‘reality’ vanish. Instead it reveals something even more true. Like real life, it doesn’t embed manufactured moments, instead allowing time to pass and its subjects to eventually move on onto… well, who knows. Because that’s how life is.
It’s this play with form that goes beyond typical technical show-offiness, then that ensures it will be discussed well into the future. Those who adhere to the medium’s rigidity probably need not apply, but those who see it as elastic should expect the bruising snap that the Ross Brothers offer. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a towering achievement that we will be talking about for decades to come.
Release: Currently screening in virtual cinemas. You can find out where on their website.
Oscar chances: They've proven somewhat adventurous with their shortlist and just two years ago they nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening so it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility, but maybe they're not ready for something that so obviously flaunts its fictional elements. Not yet, anyway.