The coast of Bucks Harbor is rugged and rugged, and so are the faces of many of the people. Director Pete Muller’s original photographer’s fluent and wide-ranging transition into documentary filmmaking is here clearly evidenced by the side-by-side, hard-lived, and visible stories depicted. His camera loves the weary, calloused men of the small Maine fishing community that gives the film its title, but his heart clearly loves, too. Capturing the rhythms and routines of life at the mercy of time, tides, and weather, “Bucks Harbor” never treats its subjects as rural ethnographic cases, but as well-rounded characters with complex stories to tell.
The film’s empathetic interest in personal, often eccentric human lives gives it a warmth that counteracts the material’s underlying melancholy, making it a pleasantly sentimental crowd-pleaser. Following its world premiere at Berlin’s Panorama program last month, “Bucks Harbor” was runner-up for the Audience Award in the same category. That was followed by its North American premiere at True/False Fest, which definitely kicked off a long docfest schedule. Nonfiction-oriented distributors should be interested in films that play attractively on streaming platforms, but are best suited to theatrical presentations for their texture and sense of place.
“If Bangor, Maine, is the shithole of the world, we’re 320 miles up there,” Mike, a stoic lobster troll fisherman, says of the remote waterfront he calls home, not far from the Canadian border. There’s no bitterness in his tone, and there’s certainly a pent-up contentment that pervades Bucks Harbor. It may be sleepy and dilapidated, but it has a unique shabby comfort.
Dave, a fisherman and former drug addict, has spent his entire life there, similarly oppressed but supported by those around him. As a teenager, he displayed artistic talent but ultimately went nowhere. He now supplements his modest income with regular visits to local food banks and uses his free time to entertain himself. Most of the time, he’s in a good mood, happy to still be around, and with support from his salty, independent mother, he’s working out what he can with his life. It’s always good value when she appears on screen. Women need men “just for the baby,” she argues. Her son is similarly content to be alone, but resists the cause.
An enchantingly funny and generous storyteller, Dave has the most superficial charisma of the film’s four main subjects, but the others flesh out a surprising overview of local working-class masculinity more than what first meets the eye. Married, middle-aged Mark works in a fishing tackle shop and appears to be a quiet, straight-laced type, but over time he finds an unexpected outlet for his more expressive impulses.
Mike is a more typical strong family man, already running the family business and raising two unusually strong young sons. The mastery of the stern faces they display on their father’s ship is quite moving. In the end, Wayne, a bearded clam, looks back on his various failed marriages and brutal childhood abuse at the hands of his father with a shrug of lack of self-pity, but there’s a quiet sadness in his weary and wounded demeanor.
Muller and editor Noel Paul do not impose a narrative arc onto these fragmented lives, but instead drift casually between them at a pace that suggests the gradual rhythm of their days. (The film’s strictly observational approach extends to the complete lack of on-screen names or title cards explaining context, giving us a sense of their good time.) Occasionally, the focus falls on the fishermen’s crustacean quarries in the deep ocean. This is also guarded and there is no need to rush, but it is very vulnerable. Although the similarities between humans and lobsters are not as expansive as one might think, the film provides a thoughtful and comprehensive look at all of the region’s inhabitants.
Similarly, “Bucks Harbor” captures the male archetypes prevalent in this small community, some patriarchally conservative, some more bizarrely progressive, all a little bruised, in enough perceptive detail that no more direct social commentary is needed. All of these men are products of raw and difficult circumstances, but no one is exactly the same. And as Muller and fellow cinematographers Nathan Goron and Mark Unger filmed in the seasonal hues of storm and stone, water, whether swirling, frozen, or still, is crucial to the proceedings, and Bucks Harbor comes across as a powerful, compelling, changeable place, the kind that compels its humble inhabitants to do its bidding.
