Peter and the Farm | Little White Lies

Peter and the Farm

04 Nov 2016

Words by Matthew Eng

Directed by Tony Stone

Starring Peter Dunning

Elderly man with long grey beard wearing a red and black checked shirt and black hat, sitting in a cluttered workshop or shed.
Elderly man with long grey beard wearing a red and black checked shirt and black hat, sitting in a cluttered workshop or shed.
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Anticipation.

What looks to be a pungent character sketch could also easily be a precious one if not careful.

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Enjoyment.

A spiked window into one man’s ruination that’s tough and striking from nearly every angle.

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In Retrospect.

Perhaps not as radical as it sets out to be, but there’s ragged poignancy to be found throughout Stone’s film – and Dunning’s life.

This warts and all doc casts a light on a tru­ly com­pelling char­ac­ter: a rag­ing, binge-drink­ing, eco-con­scious farmer.

Tony Stone’s doc­u­men­tary Peter and the Farm tears on to the screen with a sin­gle shot that sends us down a rur­al Ver­mont road with rapid speed. We slow down, sud­den­ly sur­round­ed by the autum­nal hues of near­by trees, as the cam­era calm­ly set­tles on the tit­u­lar farm, a peel­ing but stur­dy prop­er­ty, owned and over­seen by long­time farmer, Peter Dun­ning. It’s a quick and flashy but fit­ting metaphor for the push-pull between tur­bu­lence and tran­quil­i­ty that have come to define the life we are about to watch unravel.

The 70-year-old ex-Marine, one­time art stu­dent and life­long hard drinker pur­chased the farm in 1978, trans­form­ing it into a ful­ly organ­ic oper­a­tion. Which is the same way he oper­ates it today – day in, day out, no mat­ter the sea­son. Through­out Dunning’s rocky life, filled with long-gone part­ners, estranged off­spring, and lost ambi­tions, the only con­stant has ever been his farm. And, as Dun­ning declares, it’s killing him.

With his gruff charis­ma and shag­gy, griz­zled appear­ance, Dun­ning is the sort of self-dep­re­cat­ing, idio­syn­crat­ic char­ac­ter that a late-career Robin Williams might have won an award for play­ing in a dark­ly com­ic but prob­a­bly more con­ser­v­a­tive film than the one Stone has made here. Chances are, this hypo­thet­i­cal pro­duc­tion wouldn’t include the ear­ly sequence of Dun­ning shoot­ing a sheep in the head, drain­ing its blood, and final­ly shear­ing it, a moment that serves as an unof­fi­cial lit­mus test for whether or not Stone’s film can be stomached.

Even in such grue­some scenes, Peter and the Farm retains a bemused fas­ci­na­tion with Dunning’s quirks and rou­tines, made even more absorb­ing by Stone and co-cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Nathan Corbin’s gor­geous use of nat­ur­al light, which turns the sight of three pigs eat­ing slop into a love­ly, glis­ten­ing image. The cam­era clings to Dun­ning and he starts off a recep­tive star, whether sly­ly declar­ing bat­tle with the coy­otes who keep eat­ing his live­stock or show­ing off his deformed left hand, man­gled in a sawmill acci­dent. He read­i­ly recounts the farm’s glo­ry days and vivid­ly leads us through the pre­ced­ing decades, act­ing as both per­son­al his­to­ri­an and self-aggran­dis­ing tour guide. Truth­ful­ly, Dun­ning would be a com­pelling mis­fit even if Stone were inter­est­ed in cre­at­ing noth­ing more than a rus­tic, non-inter­ven­ing char­ac­ter study. But that’s not the film Peter and the Farm is.

It doesn’t take long for Stone to reveal the tor­ment­ed under­bel­ly of Dunning’s pas­toral lifestyle, per­son­i­fied by a farm that, like Dun­ning, betrays increased ten­den­cies towards dark­ness and decay. At first we only hear it, as Dun­ning pas­sive­ly bemoans the exes who ran out on him and the indif­fer­ence of his chil­dren, who can bare­ly be both­ered to pick up the phone. But then it becomes more pro­nounced: we catch Dun­ning drink­ing more and more while detached jokes about his sui­ci­dal moods begin to intensify.

In one mar­vel­lous enig­mat­ic sequence, Stone records a drunk­en Dun­ning snarling at him dur­ing a late-night melt­down. But rather than show us this moment in full, Stone films only the farm. His cam­era glides and pans as images of the house and its sur­round­ings spook­i­ly dis­solve into one anoth­er. As the rant­i­ng esca­lates, Stone shoots the moon from beneath a tree branch, show­ing through the use of some skil­ful zooms its sur­face appear­ing like jagged pat­terns in a mono­chrome kalei­do­scope. The point is pure­ly and poet­i­cal­ly visu­al: Dunning’s depres­sion is as nat­ur­al and decep­tive as the earth that encom­pass­es him.

What starts as a semi-hagio­graph­ic trib­ute to a unique way of life slow­ly morphs into a much grit­ti­er por­trait, one made all the more affect­ing by the sense that this entire pro­duc­tion might just col­lapse under Dunning’s volatile impuls­es, espe­cial­ly as he begins to resent the film­mak­ers’ very pres­ence. In one scene, Dun­ning heads to a local bar for an after­noon binge and gets into a scream­ing match with a young assis­tant direc­tor on the dri­ve back before stop­ping over at a local liquor store.

Episodes like this pose some­thing of a chal­lenge when it comes to coher­ent­ly encap­su­lat­ing Dun­ning. Stone sticks to a sea­son­al, year-in-the-life struc­ture that feels increas­ing­ly illog­i­cal for an unpre­dictable fig­ure for whom time itself is a bur­den. The lat­er chap­ters of the film tran­si­tion from win­ter into spring and find Dun­ning in a more serene and less self-destruc­tive state that might very well be an illu­sion, but the film­mak­ing itself grows too hazy to pen­e­trate that sur­face, upping the nat­ur­al grandeur but skimp­ing on the insight.

Dun­ning, for his part, con­tin­ues to rub up against the expec­ta­tions of a cen­tral doc­u­men­tary sub­ject in thorny and inter­est­ing ways; he often refus­es to stay still or silent and bit­ter­ly mocks Stone’s more benign inquiries. Per­haps every­one involved had just been cowed by him at that stage of the shoot, but the film itself becomes far too dif­fi­dent to find the com­plex­i­ty it real­ly needs, even as those ear­ly, dif­fi­cult pas­sages still slith­er in the mind.

Mid­way through the film, Dun­ning unrav­els his bleak phi­los­o­phy, seem­ing­ly with­out being prompt­ed. A life is real­ly much more impres­sive than death,” he sput­ters. A life announces itself with force. Death slinks away…” At its most force­ful, Peter and the Farm impress­es for its unflag­ging ded­i­ca­tion to a crusty rene­gade who evades the hero­ic des­ig­na­tion that a more for­mu­la­ic project might pin onto him. This is a reck­on­ing with the self – cracked, sore, and per­sis­tent, like a bruise that refus­es to heal.

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