‘Color Book’ Review: A Newly Widowed Dad and His Son With a Disability Rebuild in Moving Indie Debut

When Lucky lets himself lean ever so slightly into the groove of a soul classic playing on the radio of his newly purchased old ride, it is a moment of understated beauty the understated gem “Color Book.” The same holds for writer-director David Fortune’s debut. He slides into a precise yet gentle groove in telling the story of Lucky (William Catlett) and his 11-year-old son Mason (Jeremiah Daniels) as they begin navigating a space rearranged by an unexpected, upending death. To state that Lucky is the newly single dad to a child with Down syndrome seems both apt and somehow overstates what is handled with an unblinking, quiet care.

“Color Book” delivers lo-fi pleasures (cueing Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” for instance) and struts high-fidelity clarity (cinematographer Nikolaus Summerer’s crisp palette of inky charcoals, soft grays and luminous whites). Yet, what this spare drama truly offers is a new category. Call it “deep fidelity,” in which the filmmaker captures without flash or pretense the material, emotional and even spiritual lives of his protagonists. Charles Burnett’s classic “Killer of Sheep,” or far more recently Garrett Bradley’s documentary “Time,” come to mind as analogues.

More from Variety

ADVERTISEMENT

As with the best films that train their gaze on regular lives lived with quiet forbearance, not a lot and everything happens. A mother plays with her son. A father and son make waffles. A kid draws. A dad helps his son put on a dress shirt. Then a mother is memorialized. And that son and father begin reckoning with the absence of her together, apart and sometimes not at all, given the recentness of the tragedy.

The rhythms of time are central to “Color Book.” A day unfolds like a lifetime, yet being late to a destination remains a vexing concern. That weird warp of minutes and hours makes sense in light of the death of Lucky’s wife and Mason’s mother. But so does the pressure to make something happen — in this instance, getting Mason to his first baseball game.

Brandee Evans portrays the mourned Tammy with an easy vivacity (one that invites viewers to miss her as well). After her brief appearance stringing beads with Mason at the film’s start, she haunts Lucky in the occasional, ephemeral flashback.

Soon after a memorial service — complete with testimonies so pitch-perfect they might have you checking whether the movie is a documentary — the beading scene is revisited. Only this time, it’s Lucky and Mason sharing an arts-and-craft moment. Something feels strained. Try as he might, Lucky’s engagement is less joyful. Still, he attentively hews to their routines, leading Mason in grace, in teeth-brushing, in bedtime prayers. “It’s just going to be me and you, in the meantime,” he tells Mason.

When Lucky tries to make good on his promise to take Mason to the ball game, the duo is thrown curveball after curveball. Some come by way of outside forces. Others are the result of what could be thought of as a little instant comeuppance. Clad in his pinstripe baseball jersey, Mason wants to take a balloon that has come to have extra meaning to him to the game. Lucky says “no.” There is a brief standoff between solemn dad and pouting kid. The balloon stays. But others will float into the picture and Lucky might wish he had said “yes.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Color Book” is a meditation on fathers and sons, certainly. It is also a tribute to the unheralded ways Black fathers show up and show out. Again and again, Lucky peers out from the veil of his sorrow to take in his young son. Frustration thaws. Fondness rises. And when the language between them falls short but not their love, they resort to a playful muscle man routine, flexing their biceps, squeezing into a squat, teeth bared with faux exertion. It’s the none-to-secret language of a dad and his son. Again and again, Fortune captures the alone-together quality of this newly formed dyad. (Composer Dabney Morris’s score often sets the tone between sorrow and the hushed grandeur of love.) He’s right to trust in the emotional tug of these two and doesn’t overexplain or get out ahead of their story.

Even before Lucky has his first flashback to lovelier days, Catlett has been carrying the weight and bittersweet power of reminiscence in his visage. We can see Lucky trying to recalibrate his role as sole caretaker, mixing tenderness with strength.

As 11-year-old Mason, Daniels embraces the film’s aesthetic, too, one that holds silences and honors stillness. There are moments when Mason’s amusingly stubborn in his immovable stance. He stares at his father in much the way Lucky stares at him: with curiosity, adoration and occasionally low-grade exasperation.

Embedded in this portrait of dad and son is a sketch of community and place. A particularly poignant scene in a film with no shortage of them occurs in a metro car when Lucky and Mason run into family friend Meech (Njema Williams), who asks Mason to draw him in the notebook full of pictures Mason carries. It’s clear from this and an earlier exchange with Lucky’s friend Rico (rapper Kia Shine Coleman) that Mason is taken up by his parents’ friends. With nuance, the writer-director makes this closeness both a given and notable.

“Color Book” is set in Atlanta — a chilly, wet ATL. And Lucky and Mason’s public transit journey to the ballpark provides views of a far-flung metropolis, with its mix of light industrial pauses between modest or worn neighborhoods, low-slung apartment buildings and storefronts.

ADVERTISEMENT

Where there is affection, there is also exhaustion. It’s Lucky’s bone-weariness that leads to the two being separated. We are only a little less worried about this than Lucky. And viewers could be angry with him, except we know how hard he’s trying to do right by his son and his late wife.

But others will be suspicious, seeing carelessness and intervening in ways that are completely appropriate but could also be devastating. A concerned MARTA worker manages to be both potential hero and narrative villain. She’s not the only woman to show care. At a diner, a waitress (Terri J. Vaughn) serves up sweetness.
As Lucky pays up, one gets the sense this lovely, wounded duo will come through, even thrive. Given this moving debut, the same goes for the impressively good Fortune.

Best of Variety

Sign up for Variety's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.