****/****
directed by Monteith McCollum
by Walter Chaw Hybrid is an elegy for the passing of a man who fell in love early in his life and remained faithful until the day he died, two years past turning one-hundred. Presented in gritty blacks and whites, Monteith McCollum's six-year labour of love memorializing his grandfather Milford Beeghly is a stunning documentary that itself plays as a hybrid of something dreamed-up by Errol Morris and the Brothers Quay. Ostensibly about Beeghly's obsession with finding the perfect hybrid breed of corn as an industrial crop, the film somehow becomes a grand metaphor–for the rough grace of the American way of life, for the lingering death of the agrarian lifestyle, for the difficulties of balancing family with a calling, and even for the true meaning of happiness.
Hybrid avoids the urge to which many documentaries succumb: interjecting narrative morals where the silences of mere humanity more eloquently convey a bounty of lessons. McCollum understands that there is a story in his grandfather's life better told through long takes of the flat land that Beeghly pounded, fondled, sowed, and reaped his entire life. He loved corn's fecundity ("Corn is so alive and unafraid of its sexuality") and did what he could to foster its growth, taking five years at a time to allow his cross-pollinated vegetable "children" to reach a level of purity that would allow for them to replicate eternally and incestually. Beeghly's fixation alienated his late wife and children; daughter Alice, the mother of the filmmaker, is still stung by Beeghly's rejection–you can see it in her eyes. Hybrid touches at the soul of Beeghly when it sits back and observes him hobbling between his rows, fondling the greenery like a proud father. McCollum's own quirky score–favourably recalling work by neo-classicist quartet The Rachels–gels with the still photography, stop-motion animation, and time-lapse into an ineffable and archetypal gestalt. Incredibly, Hybrid is McCollum's first cinematic offering; it's hard to imagine how he could surpass it. (Showing with Ken Perko's 3-minute short "A Day in the Life.")
