In part, this is because the movie is set in the Mississippi Delta. In part, it's the result of style. The camera remains handheld for most of the movie, and the staccato rhythms of Hammer's editing create blips of scenes that comprise a story. In other words, "Ballast" is a work of realism. In the second scene, an older white man pulls up to the door of a little one-story house surrounded by almost nothing but gray sky and grass. He knocks on the door. A large, sad-looking black man lets him in but doesn't say a word. The visitor looks around the house and finds a body, on its side in a bed. The large guy - his name is Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.) - walks out of the house to the home next door and out of the camera's view. We hear a tiny gunshot.
We have no special knowledge of what's going on. And our usual movie-psychic skills are no good here. Scenes seem determined by behavior, emotion, and mood more than screenwriting. The body in the bed belonged to Lawrence's suicidal twin brother, Darius. They lived in twin shacks, and Lawrence spends the rest of movie doubly inconsolable - his brother took his life and he failed to do the same.
When an young intruder pokes his head into Lawrence's front door and holds him at gunpoint, he calmly dares the child to shoot him - "I don't care," he says. The armed little boy happens to be Lawrence's nephew and Darius's son, James (JimMyron Ross), and James needs cash to feed his crack habit.
