Harvest strikes an emotional nerve that is hard to forget

Marc Meyers talks about Harvest, which has an added screening at The Cleveland Intl. Film Festival
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A film is a sum of many parts coming together to ultimately tell what the filmmaker hopes is a compelling story. Further, if the film is lucky, it will tell a story that its audience can relate to on multiple levels, making a deep connection to the characters that populate its world. Unless your heart and soul are made of stone or they simply no longer exist, there is no way that you cannot be moved emotionally by the perfectly simple, yet intricately woven storytelling that went on in the new independent film Harvest, written and directed by Marc Meyers. Having seen Harvest in a week that three films a day minimum were watched (I was covering the Cleveland International Film Festival), it took something really special to standout as one of the best films. Harvest did just that, certainly proving to be one of the three best films, not just American Independent films (Harvest won Best American Independent Feature at the festival), but one of the three best of all the films that screened there. There were so many exceptional filmmakers, from Rumle Hammerich of Denmark, Jan H?ebejk of The Czech Republic, to Emily Abt from the US, along with many others, but Harvest grabbed everyone in the theater and did not let them go until the credits were complete far beyond any film at the festival that I attended.

Harvest follows three generations of the empathetically dysfunctional Monopoli family who have been brought together in the same Connecticut house to be close to the ill patriarch of the family Siv (the surly but tender Robert Loggia). The story flows from the point of view of a college student Josh (the vulnerable yet powerful Jack Carpenter), as he ends up staying with his family rather than head to a beach house where his girlfriend and the rest of his friends are all hanging out at for the summer. The residents of the house include Siv and his failing in memory wife Yetta (Barbara Barrie), as well as his mother Anna (Victoria Clark) and her brother Benny (Arye Gross), both divorced and struggling to find their way to happiness. As Josh deals with the failing health and happiness surrounding him, he concurrently finds himself in the midst of his own journey to true maturity, trying to find an understanding of the world and how to make your way through it. Not having experienced things exactly the way Josh does in the film, it was still easy to identify with him, Siv, and the Monopoli family, as Meyers and his collaborators are such adept storytellers, finding moment after moment of telling footage to focus on and bring together in an entertaining and poignant way. Any one of any age or experience level with death could not help but feel connected to someone in the film.

Another key component of the emotional energy carried throughout the film is the soundtrack and score, led by the award winning recording artists Duncan Sheik & David Poe. Being a great filmmaker involves taking all the elements at your disposal, then making the most of the moments on screen with no dialogue, where the vulnerability of the characters is exposed purely, not clouded by their words, which are easy to manipulate. Life is about one's actions, and Harvest delves into the reality of these choices, through the music, the cinematography that showed a clear knowledge of the importance of using natural lighting, the brilliant and timely editing, truly using all the tools of filmmaking as well as any film I have seen this year. For the record, I stopped counting at 250 this year alone, new films that is.

The key juxtaposition of happiness and practicality carries strong through the film, putting the reality that most families face at the forefront: they lack adequate time to spend together in this overworked, world where family time can often take a back seat to career and self. With a film so rich in emotions and character development, you would think there was an excess of dialogue trying to convey this kind of information. For Meyers, he seems to have been painstakingly precise in planning his vision for the execution of the film's visual storytelling, carrying this on in his own work with the soundly developed script, never wasting words in the film, with his background as a playwright clearly aiding his writing in Harvest.

There is so much more depth to discuss with this film, but you honestly need to see it for yourself. See what the effect is on you, and a shot in the dark here is that it will affect everyone differently. Harvest is a film that will find its audience one way or another because that audience is all of us. Within all of us is an emotional place that is worth exploring and trust me, Harvest is a film that can take you there. If you are interested in following along with the coverage of Harvest, which also screened at The Connecticut Film Festival in a special home state screening (read more here), the CIFF, or film festivals in the future, you can receive these articles directly as they are published by clicking on the “Subscribe” button at the top of this piece. You can also follow me on Twitter by searching for ericshlapack or by clicking the link below.

For more info:
Website for Harvest
The Cleveland International Film Festival
The Connecticut Film Festival
My coverage of the CIFF and Harvest
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