Porterfield Comes Home Again for Second Film

The convergence of traffic and crowds around the Charles Theater district on Friday night added to the buzz and expectation surrounding the hometown opening of Matt Porterfield’s latest film, Putty Hill.

The Baltimore native's second feature focuses on the friends and family of a young man who has died of a heroin overdose. 

“This is the most important one for me,” Porterfield told a full house before the screening. “Opening in my hometown.”

Spawned from “Metal Gods,” a project that lost its funding, he shot Putty Hill in 12 days on a shoestring budget with many first-time actors and largely without a script.

The film has received international recognition, including favorable reviews from the New York Times and legendary critics such as Roger Ebert, who referred to Porterfield’s “radical filmmaking techniques” as “surprisingly effective” in penetrating the truth. The movie is a testament to the passion of a director who will stop at nothing to make a movie. 

Porterfield’s films evoke the early work of John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus Seven) and Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law).  His scenes linger and accrue, revealing more details, but not giving too much away.

Using the documentary approach for part of the film, we see the characters in their natural surroundings—playing paintball in the woods, at the skateboarding park, swimming and mowing lawns.

“My movies are filled with lawnmowers and above-ground pools,” said Porterfield. “They take place along Harford Road.” 

A young skateboarder who spray paints a memorial R.I.P, a tattoo artist and ex-con struggling to reconnect with his daughter, and a sympathetic Nana played by Virginia Heath anchor the film with substance and validity—disrupting its languorous detachment.

The moments of epiphany are captured by the camera, including a spider web near the film’s end, lifting in the night wind, serving as metaphor for both the heroin addict and the hopeless lives of those who’ve survived him. 

As the credits began to roll, the largely partisan crowd of friends, family and cast members cheered the hometown boy.

Following in a strong tradition of Baltimore filmmakers such as John Waters and Barry Levinson, Porterfield attended the Park School and studied film at NYU for two years. His first feature, Hamilton (2007), received a favorable review in the New Yorker.

Despite the movie’s harsh sense of realism, the message is meant to be a hopeful one.

"Everyone in the film is making art to deal with it,” said Porterfield. “I see that as a positive.”