It is difficult to decide what is the most glorious shot at the start of “Boatbuilders” as director Luke Lorentzen can point a camera in any direction on a clear day in Maine and see natural beauty, but you can’t disagree when it settles on a collection of employees at the Brooklin Boat Yard buffering out any remaining blemishes on a ship they’ve just built. In a world where everything seems to be falling apart, from the cheaply made T-shirt that seems as if it begins to tear a bit sooner than it did ten years ago to the unraveling of a larger social fabric, the care put into craftsmanship by an assortment of men washing windows and polishing the paint with great, taking great pride in what they’ve put together, is truly a sight for sore eyes and when the ship is so well-built that the champagne bottle meant to christen it when smashed against the bow bounces back, it seems more of a cause for celebration than if the tradition had gone smoothly.
When Lorentzen has established himself as one of the preeminent observational filmmakers in recent years with indelible portraits of systems that have a way of overwhelming those trying to operate with them, from the ambulance drivers of Mexico City that have propped up a precarious health care operation in “Midnight Family” to a chaplain-in-training who finds absorbing the pain of others leads to her own in “A Still, Small Voice,” it can feel as if the director was cutting himself a break as he offers a gentle reprieve to everyone else, embedding in an idyllic Northeastern coastal town of 827 people to sit in on a 60-year business looks as sturdy and dependable as one of their boats. Following the construction of just one of them from stem to stern over what appears to be the course of a year, there is both the skill and patience of Frederick Wiseman in Lorentzen’s approach when one can simply admire the collaboration and planning that goes into making something seaworthy and how the company contributes to the community as a whole as the filmmaker will climb aboard the ships of local lobstermen or those setting sail in a regatta.
The process of building custom wooden yachts alone is a gripping one. When the boats are built in halves, there may be no more riveting scene than seeing the top of one lowered onto the hull after it’s finished with the prayer that even after being measured, the places for rods to hold it all in place align. But the cooperation within a company that requires both the minds of engineers and the brawn of workers who turned to physical labor when math was never their strong suit is just as compelling as management tries to strike a balance to make it all work, with a constant struggle by those in charge to be a boss versus just being one of the guys. (There’s real anguish in scenes outlining holiday pay for part-time workers versus full-time and the dismissal of an anonymous employee that doesn’t follow direction has real tension in it when they truly have to live with their decision in such a small town.) Unlike Lorentzen’s previous films, there is no real central character to speak of, though the film keeps drifting back to Trent, a newly minted project manager and expectant father who can be seen as a personification of the company in its attempts to sustain itself, described by a client as a “duck” who is “super mellow” on the surface, but paddling furiously underneath and tries with only some success to meet his superiors’ wishes that he’d become more assertive as a leader.
However, the film is less of a departure than you’d think for Lorentzen even as it plays out like an excursion for most that live outside of Maine, when as much it can honor competency, it isn’t ignorant of the economic inequality that has contributed to a healthy business for Brooklin and still makes those working there feel a bit uneasy. The numbers flying about in a scene about cost overruns on their current project make clear that all the company’s considerable time and effort is going into a product that none of them could ever dream of affording themselves but instead a financial advisor who has likely never gotten their hands dirty, and when the ship needs to be painted, the most toxic part of the assembly, Vietnamese immigrants are brought in and voluntarily toil 18-hour days that the American-born workers can’t fathom as timecards are being processed. While much of the running time is spent in awe of people insuring different elements lining up perfectly to make something work, Lorentzen admirably acknowledges how often it’s the imperfections that shape things and while “Boatbuilders” is buoyant, it carries a tremendous amount of weight.
“Boatbuilders” will screen again at the Venice Film Festival on September 8th at 2 pm at Astra 2.