ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT - Mark Reviews Movies

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 9, 2023

From writer/director Raven Jackson's perspective, all of it is in the hands. There are faces in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, of course, but this story of a family living out a decade or so and more in Mississippi makes its primary connection in how hands touch water, fish, bodies, and each other.

It's an intriguing experiment in trying to force us to reconsider a sense we might take for granted, because so much of our experience of remembering revolves around sights, sounds, and even smells. Memory, too, emerges as a central theme here, since the entire narrative jumps back and forth between the youth and young adulthood of its main character.

She finds young love with a neighbor and many complications arising from that, as well as other things, in the ensuing years, and a shot late in the movie suggests that all of this story is nothing but a memory, triggered, not by some vision of a river or the noise of insects or the smells of nature, but by the slippery feel of mud sliding through a woman's fingers. A similar shot, albeit in extreme close-up, opens the movie, so the connection seems impossible to ignore.

Is that all there is to this story and, indeed, the whole of this movie, though? Watching it, we get a fine sense of how time seems to stop in certain moments of importance—such as a lengthy embrace that seems as if it will never end, even though it must—but how quickly it moves in general.

When we're children, everything seems new and exciting, because it is, really. Such matters stick, even if the sticking is only subconscious, such as a moment here when the main character's young beau explains how he learned to swim. His father tossed him in the water, almost causing the young boy to drown, but when the father jumped in to help the kid, the boy caught enough of his father's legs kicking underwater to figure out what he needed to do. We learn by example, whether that be the little things, like swimming or how to prepare a catfish for cooking, or the more significant ones, like how to love another and show that we do.

Such thoughts inevitably emerge while watching Jackson's story of Mack, played as a child by Kaylee Nicole Johnson and as a teen and beyond by Charleen McClure. They almost have to, because the screenplay never gives us a sense of who these characters are beyond their relationships and the scant details of what happens to them over the course of their lives. There's no way to understand who they are or what they want in any specificity, and in a way, doesn't that cut through much of what gets in the way of leading a fulfilling life? For as simplistic as the characters' obvious needs and desires may be, what more could anyone truly want, except to have the experiences portrayed here?

They're the ones that happen between the seemingly important events of life. There's a wedding in this story, for example, but Jackson's focus isn't on the ceremony. No, it's on the faces of the congregation—people whose visages will never appear again in this movie—simply watching, and later, it's on the happy couple rushing out of the church to see their family members, now that the two of them are officially a new family.

Mack gives birth, too, at one point, after an affair with her neighbor Wood, played as child by Preston McDowell and as a teenager and young man by Reginald Helms Jr. The affair is implied, by way of a brief discussion about Wood's wife and child, and the obvious love between them is shown in that long embrace, where the camera lingers on Mack's hand on his shoulder and Wood's hand touching the small of her back. In a similar way, it's not the birth itself that matters here, but it is the way Mack's hands hold her new baby, as well as the way her sister Josie (played as a kid by Jayah Henry and at an older age by Moses Ingram) touches the baby and her sibling's hands.

Some flashbacks show the sisters' mother Evelyn (Sheila Atim) caring for and cradling a baby Mack, and within the chronology of the movie's back-and-forth narrative, those scenes arrive well after the mother's unseen death. We learn of it by a sudden cut to the two young girls in the backseat of a car, preparing themselves for a final goodbye at the local church, and of their father Isaiah (Chris Chalk) carrying his wife's body from the riverbank back to the home they had made together. Once again, the heart of the story returns to how these characters touch and, indeed, carry each other through everything, until it's no longer possible to do so.

Jackson's tactile approach to character, relationships, and narrative keeps us thinking about such things in ways that go well beyond the experiences of these characters. That's a positive, to be sure, although it's mainly on account of how thin and shallow All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt ultimately is. On occasion, the movie is a lovely, poetic depiction of how a simple touch can say more than any words, but that doesn't mean it has much to say, either.

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