45365 (2010): A-

An evocative, wide-ranging portrait of a community told via narrative-free montage, 45365 affords a window onto the world of directors Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross’ Sidney, Ohio hometown, whose zip code provides its title. Uninterested in conventional storytelling, this stunning debut documentary instead conveys truths about everyday routines, relationships, hardships, customs and crisis via chronologically arranged snapshots of the town’s inhabitants – men getting drunk on a weekend night, fathers singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to their young daughters, troublemakers being hauled off to jail, kids driving around shopping center parking lots and goofing off at local playgrounds, girls talking about boyfriends while doing their nails, and boys fighting over games of Madden. A mayoral race supplies a wispy guiding structure, with the film otherwise creating, through random snippets of personal and humdrum moments, a sociological panorama of life – male and female, well-off and poor, hopeful and downcast – in all its complexity. The directors’ camera sneaks its way into intimate vantage points on its subjects’ private dilemmas and public behavior, and their visual mosaic is enhanced by an aural collage of diegetic music, ordinary conversations, and TV and radio broadcasts that impart a loving, bone-deep impression of Sidney’s atmosphere. No preaching or underlined messages are delivered. Rather, in its accumulation of unremarkable details – from high-school football games, domestic chit-chat and fishing trips, to views of main street storefront marquees, rural roads and rolling rivers – 45365 crafts a symphonic sense of time and place, and in doing so locates the profound in the prosaic.