In one corner of Third World America, where pigeons are pets, a 12-year-old boy in Queens scrounges for chop shops purveyors in the shadow of the Flushing Line as constant flights from La Guardia glide across the Willets Point sky like unobtainable mirages. It’s a life teeming with transportation for people going nowhere.
And with this honest, visceral reality, director Ramin Bahrani has created the most potent political advertisement of 2008 with the instantaneously classic, neo-realist “Chop Shop.” But he’s not didactic nor prone to exposition. There’s not a single soliloquy amongst the multinational chatter. This movie isn’t a crossword puzzle. There’s no time for reflection, even as every pothole retains water and harsh fluorescent streetlights buzz like cicadas. Bahrani, a native North Carolinian, shares a documentary-like style with Ken Loach but is less arch than the mercurial English genius. He reveals this raw world without overt polemics. “Chop Shop” isn’t an indictment; it’s simply the view from the trenches. It’s the lives of the uninsured, the underrepresented, the intolerated. If it makes an audience uneasy, well, that’s because Bahrani invokes a straight-forward but emotionally gripping tone that compels the viewer to experience these lives in the unflinching foreground.
The protagonist is Ale, the plucky, spindly slender young boy who lives in a bare room above a bay in a shop garage. When the metal grated door is locked, he lives with no direct sunlight, only a small, sliding window to open for a view of the bay. He sleeps on a modest twin bed next to an oscillating table fan which has lost its front cover. Dinner is microwaved popcorn.
But amidst his meager existence, Ale is driven, and works his ass off. He doesn’t attend school but he’s enrolled in an outsider’s vo-tech, stripping autos, buffing cars, and nicking hubcaps. He sells candy on the subway and Cds in the alley’s taqueria line. He is a feral child with a ferocious appetite to succeed with the limited resources at his disposal. Dilligently responsible, Ale is trusted by his employer to lock himself in at night. He has plans for a future; in reality when its 4:57, his future is 4:58.
We don’t know what led Ale to this point. There’s no explanation for the absence of his parents. And we don’t know how he’s gained the trust of his employer. But Bahrani doesn’t have time to coddle us with these incidentals. Instead, he unearths a present with no past and invites us to react to the immediacy of Ale’s existence. Into this life, his sister arrives and soon her choices thrust Ale into an even murkier reality. His life is like his stash of money; even when it’s in a safe place it’s vulnerable.
Alejandro Polanco provides a stupendous performance. As his namesake, he is innocence and guile melded. His face broadcasts both wizened gravity and childlike wonder. There’s nothing precious in his performance or his presentation. Polanco may become a one-hit wonder, but it’s a knockout punch.
“Chop Shop” is an important film — especially timely as a national election affords a country a concrete opportunity to acknowledge and embrace working class issues — which ends ambivalently; dreams scuppered, hopes hopefully reignited. Yet, this isn’t an angry, berating story. The anthem for this picture is not “Oh, say can you seethe?” It is a more subtle study than this.
Standing on an overlook outside Shea Stadium, Ale and his only child friend, Carlos, find a sliver of a view, a speck of diamond between second base and shortstop. If candidates do not address these marginalized lives they are either dangerously ignorant or oblivious cowards. And the stumping platitudes that drip from their lips will be as remote to Third World America as flights skimming above the home base of the brave.
One Film Beyond 