Beyond Words: Linas Phillips’ “Great Speeches from a Dying World”

Phillips is able to strike a fine balance between documentarian and confidant, especially with Tomey, whose story emerges as the film’s dramatic arc. Gray-haired and nearly skeletal, Tomey embodies many of the contradictions of homelessness. In trouble from an early age, Tomey ended up in jail, where he contracted HIV. Ever since serving time he’s fought, usually unsuccessfully, against crack addiction, his habit having claimed victim to Jean, an ex-girlfriend consigned to starting her life over at her brother’s house. Funny and likable, Tomey is also as quick to pick a fight on a bus as he is to fall off the wagon, and his attitude—toward the world and his place in it—vacillates with the ups and downs of his struggle against substance abuse. Though Phillips ends “Great Speeches” with him getting his life together again, Tomey’s behavior demonstrates how hard it is to put a stop to a downward spiral.

As for the speeches, they make for the least compelling moments of Phillips’s project. While they don’t tip over into exploitation by making fools of the homeless men and women who recite them, they’re also clearly the result of concentrated efforts at memorization or recitations from off-screen cue cards rather than expressive interpretations. Conceptually they reduce their speakers to symbols when, for instance, Vietnam vet Sarge’s oration of the Gettysburg Address plays on the line “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract,” or when Jose, a troubled man with a long history of self destruction and attempts at suicide, intones “To be or not to . . .” from his hospital bed.

Rather than connect the subjects’ stories to the universal, immortal words of history’s giants, the speeches instead unintentionally abstract them. And a clunky theatricality surfaces with Phillips’s decision to punctuate the speeches with slight directorial flourishes, as when Native American Jonas’s Chief Sealth speech ends with a dramatic camera track backward, or when Tomey’s recitation of John Donne’s “No Man Is an Island”—perhaps the most moving of the lot, coming as it does after the death of the transgendered woman he befriended and looked after at a homeless shelter—concludes with a pan to a reflection of the speaker in a window.

That said, these moments would be significantly more contrived if it seemed that Phillips was using them to draw attention away from incompetent, unengaged filmmaking that failed to impart the struggle of homelessness. That certainly isn’t the case here, and the “gimmick” of Phillips’s sophomore work can be excused as the understandable miscalculation of an intelligent, sensitive, and ambitious director who has greatly improved from his mixed, off-the-cuff debut to this fine, focused documentary.

[Michael Joshua Rowin is a staff writer at Reverse Shot. He also writes for L magazine, Stop Smiling, and runs the blog Hopeless Abandon.]