Jonah Greenstein | Dedalus / 2018

soil, flesh, and stone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jonah Greenstein (screenwriter and director) Dedalus / 2018

 

Iowa-born director Jonah Greenstein’s first feature film, Dedalus has more connection with the Hungarian director Béla Tarr than to most Hollywood filmmakers. Like Tarr, Greenstein uses languidly controlled camera movements that focus as much on the detail of the landscape than they do on character, along with a highly disjunctive narrative that tells its story with huge gaps in both time and logic. The viewer must slowly puzzle together the story out of the images, and character derives from the landscape as much as it does from the acting.

   Greenstein uses mostly newer and unknown actors along with a few professionals to create unexpected faces who must basically tell their own stories. At one point in the movie when a man picks up the hustler (played by Alexander Horner) central to the second part of this work, he comments, “You don’t talk much,” to which the hustler answers, “But I’m a good listener.” So does this film demand that we all be good “watchers,” that we ourselves become cognizant of the visual.

     Dedalus is also a triptych, a work in three parts and different periods, the first taking place in Iowa, the second in New York, an the third in Los Angeles—fascinating for someone like me since these three locations (despite long periods in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Baltimore), have been the three central foci of my own life.

   What I am suggesting, in short, is that Greenstein’s type of filmmaking will surely not satisfy everyone, and a number of the few commentors who have even bothered to write of this neglected film have found it far too slow moving and even described it as boring.

     I find it beautiful and emotionally moving; but then I like the slow-process works of Tarr as well, a “balletic” approach to moviemaking (so argued The New Yorker of Greenstein’s method) which irritates the hell out of many regular moviegoers.

     Finally, although I describe this film to be primarily of LGBTQ interest, the shorter first and last parts of this triptych are heterosexual, although you might certainly describe the last section as even sexless.

     I have characterized the three parts as “soil, flesh, and stone,” although you might also designate them vaguely as a kind of past, present, and future reality of some minor figure, such as the grocery store cashier, if you imagine his escape from Iowa, a move to an unforgiving New York, and his inevitable transformation into an elderly man in Los Angeles.

    There is, however, no link between the characters from these distinctly different sections; only to the formal approaches to each with which the director takes.

     In the Iowa section we are immediately faced with an entire farmhouse of isolated and distraught individuals. The farmer father, worried about the weeds returned to his soy fields, cannot even arouse the attentions of his busy wife, who slaps his hands when he dares to touch her while she is busy in the kitchen.

     Meanwhile, the family’s daughter—evidently the offspring of an earlier marriage of the farmer or his wife since the IMDb description (presumably composed by the director or someone connected with the film) describes the boy of the film as her step-brother—takes a lonely run before returning home while her step-brother lies in bed, the latter only eventually wandering over to an isolated field where several derelict cars and other pieces of machinery have been ditched, there to drink beer with an older man.

     None of these people seem to be able to find much human communication. Only later that evening do we see a gathering of younger folk around a fire. At the event the farm girl, fairly drunk, goes wandering off into a nearby woods, her step-brother following. When the two encounter each other, she removes her blouse as he approaches her, the two engaging in consensual sex. But only moments later, it becomes clear that several high school rowdies have followed them, immediately gang raping the girl. The camera does not show us the sexual acts, simply the bare feet filthy with mud and, soon after, her naked body curled up in a fetal position after her spiritual “soiling.”

   Time passes quickly, and in one of the very next scenes we see the girl angrily storming off to the grocery story, dust flying through the air as she speeds into town, there to spot the rapists in the local café where her own step-brother also sits apart from them.

     Soon after, she is already quite obviously pregnant, and upon a later visit to the same grocery store, she takes along her toddler son, who encounters in one of the aisles a couple of the rapists, one of them perhaps the father of the child, she scooping the boy up, checking out of the grocery line near where her step-brother also works as a cashier, and driving home with the child strapped into the back seat.

    Neither she, her step-brother, or father, dare say anything in this small town about the event, and each evidently have no choice but to bitterly stand in silent witness to the impact it has had on her and their own lives. Their internal anger, however, is conveyed in several ways, the father hunkering down in the middle of his soybeans, almost disappearing within his crops as he pulls out the weeds, the mother staring longingly out a high window, the boy angrily tossing eggs at a dumpster during a work break.

      Yet the beauty of their world shines through brightly at nearly all times of the day and night, Greenstein’s and cinematographer Jake Saner’s camera focusing on it as if it might be the only thing that keeps these folks alive in the hostile environment in which their lives are determinedly shaped.

      After a short moment of blackened screen, we are set down into a noisy gay club in the back of which we vaguely observe a 20-some year-old man fellating a far older man. He is a homeless hustler who connects up mostly with older men who can provide him with food, sometimes shelter, and a kind of desperate sexual intimacy.

      Either this young man is seeking a father, an idea thrown out by one of his clients (Thomas Jay Ryan), or is a true gerontophile is not established. But it does appear that our rather handsome young angel prefers to offer up his body mostly to elderly men.

     A one point, while sleeping on a New York City park bench he is picked up by a young woman (Ashley Robicheaux) who apparently seeks out temporarily empty apartments to inhabit and later actually rents another place, in both cases sharing her bed with the charming hustler.

      There is no sex between them shown, but clearly they come to care for one another even though it has become apparent that our young hero has become particularly attracted to one of his clients, perhaps a teacher, returning to him time and again. Another of his elderly clients even takes him to Atlantic City for the weekend, handing him cash even to try his hand at gambling.

    But it is the professional who takes him to a dance/play and regularly dines him in quiet restaurants that the handsome hustler keeps returning to, despite the fact that gradually the older man, his symbolic “daddy”—a word once affixed to this film—attempts to wean the boy and himself away from one another, knowing that it cannot be good for either of them to imagine a long-lasting relationship. Yet the elder clearly enjoys the sex, and the younger not only enjoys the sexual experience but the older man’s company. At one point, to demonstrate his love, the younger man, having just hooked up with another client a few days earlier, offers to pay for dinner with the pride of hopefully demonstrating his responsibility in what he may wish might become a real relationship.

     It is this tension between the desire of flesh and the reality of the age, along with class, position, and experience, that dominates this part of the movie.

   We have no idea what drives the rather high functioning gay man—a man who insists that he and his siblings remain quite close and still care for one another—or the younger hustler into the arms of one another except the call of flesh. But finally, there is more in their encounters than either is able to fully accept. The youth’s attempts to fly from the labyrinth of his life fails because his hopes are too immense to be answered by the gifts of his father Dedalus.

 a doctor’s office. Soon after the camera catches him with his woman friend sitting on the stoop of a liquor store without speaking, and a few frames later she is hugging him, tears running down her face. I read the scene as her discovery that he is HIV-Positive. As usual in this film, no such words are spoken, and we have no testimony through dialogue that this might be the case; we are simply forced to deduce the logic of what we witness with our eyes.

     In the very last scene of this section, we see our hustler with a much younger man with whom he evidently has enjoyable sex, after which he insists that he doesn’t need to be paid. Whether or not this charitable act represents a shift in our young hero’s behavior, guilt for his possibly infecting another human being, or some other unexplained transformation we are not told. It is again up to us to make sense of the incomplete reality displayed before us on the screen.

     As in real life, people do not behave as we might expect them to. In such delicious filmmaking all individuals are original eccentrics.

     In the last section, we see an older man who evidently worked as a photographer or perhaps has recently taken it up as an avocation. At the moment he is doing a shoot of a handsome elderly woman with whom it might be said that he is flirting, complimenting her on the way his frame captures her.

   This is clearly a man who has survived into old age by trying to keep in good health, and seeking out his independence as long as possible. But in the short span of this part of the film, we observe his body beginning finally to rebel, things he used to do daily suddenly and without warning become difficult. Small disasters begin to pile up, symbolized by a moment when he is vacuuming his balcony while leaving the water running in the kitchen sink, quickly spilling over onto the floor.

   He has difficulty walking at some moments. And finally he visits the doctor who reports the inevitable, his spine is aging and decaying, his knees and legs are breaking down.

     He now has no choice but to move in with his daughter, an enormous sacrifice of both their previous independence. She seems pleased to be able to care for him, but also realizes the difficulties she will have face as he greedily eats the pulp of an orange in a most unpleasing manner.

     But he, even more than she, feels now utterly lost. Taking a short swim with her in the pool, he decries his condition, that which if we live long enough, we all must face: “I lost it. I don’t know what needs to be done. And I’m scared. And I tried to change, and I did change. But I didn’t…I didn’t do anything, that would make a difference.”

     Even Greenstein’s language, when it appears, generally has a dual meaning. He may be speaking of his immediate condition, the quick shift to exercises and physical changes he has made when he has begun to encounter his bodily changes. Yet, at the same, he might be reflecting on his entire life, that he has now felt he has lost without making a change on anything around him, including himself, forcing him to recognize his life as quite meaningless, the way the characters of the very first section and the young hustler of the second might also have already perceived their lives. Their dreams—mostly shallow, their desires—basically unreciprocated, even their final stand of independence—leaves them with nothing as their bodies turn to stone.

    The old man with his cane goes tottering down a garden lane to be lost to nature in the film’s very last frame.

    Critic Ben Lindner, writing in Picture This Post, expresses what I have said somewhat differently, but with similar effect:

 

“How the script tells each story with very little dialogue is a very effective tool, in this writer’s view, to bring us deeply into the powerful emotional terrain of each story. It’s not just the young girl’s tears as she drives, but also the exhausted gaze from her parents as they stare over their moonlit cornfield, and later the stolen glances from the boy who saw everything.  Without words we see how her trauma has poured from her into those around her.  Similarly, in the second story the young man’s expression as he looks into the mirror to see himself as a starving man scarcely resembling the naïve young boy he was just months ago, the arc of the story seems to be captured in one look. In the last part of this triptych, it is when we see the old man calmly taking in the sunset above the ocean waves that we realize that this is the first time we have seen him stand still. In this way the camera reveals his newfound acceptance of his mortality, rather than with any words.”

 

    One might almost witness this ultimately astounding film as a kind of scrapbook of far too many American lives, the way their dreams have of drying up and disappearing before they can get the chance to explore them; the way their attempts to find true companionship falter before they can break through fully to the heart of another; and the way even their own bodies betray their existence, forcing them to finally give themselves up to the ephemeral world of ghosts who inhabit the nonetheless immensely beautiful landscape which they briefly inhabited.

 

Los Angeles, August 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).