All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt Review: An Oblique Ode to Inheritance and Rebirth

The first image in writer-director Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt—a close-up of a hand squeezing a freshly caught fish, its reflective scales mirrored by the twinkling, gauzy light captured on 35mm by cinematographer Jomo Fray—quickly immerses us in the film’s world. The relationship between bodies and the natural world that surrounds them, mediated by the physical properties of film, is central to Jackson’s work. As the scene progresses, the camera’s focus remains resolutely on what may seem like its incidental textures, tracking the interplay of skin, earth, and water as if they were brushstrokes on a canvas.

The elemental poeticism of these images is clear evidence of Jackson’s promise as a filmmaker, and yet this opening sequence also points to why All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt amounts to a limited showcase for her talents. Essentially all of the film’s aesthetic, thematic, and tonal range can be distilled to those few shots, and while they certainly hit a lovely note, the impact of the deceptively ambitious narrative is severely limited by its unwillingness to deviate from that note.

That narrative, such as it is, is composed of glimpses into the life of Mack (played principally by Charleen McClure, but also by Kaylee Nicole Johnson and Zainab Jah at different ages) and her sister, Josie (Jayah Henry as a child and Moses Ingram as an adult), across several decades of life in a Black family in Mississippi. Jackson’s longest short film up to this point, “Nettles,” compares the titular plant to “stinging moments in the lives of women and girls,” and focuses on several different female characters in ephemeral but subtly formative moments of vulnerability. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’s narrative operates on a similar principle, eschewing traditional notions of momentum and chronology and presenting its characters’ lives as a tangle of defining images and memories. The approach is as daring as it is appropriate—a memory piece primarily focused on lending equal physical presence to the past, present and future.

Mack’s past is filtered largely through her remembrances of her parents, Isaiah (Chris Chalk) and Evelyn (Sheila Atim), usually captured in the warm, tender glow that envelops the entirety of All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Isaiah is often seen passing on knowledge and traditions to his daughters (he’s the one teaching them how to fish in the opening scene)—a key element of the film’s vision of a way of life being handed down through generations. Evelyn cuts a striking figure swaying to Gladys Knight and the Pips as Mack looks on with a mixture of adoration and curiosity, attempting to form a mental portrait of the woman that she’s tragically never able to complete. Windows into her adult years include a reconnection with a childhood sweetheart, Wood (Preston McDowell as a child and Reginald Helms Jr. as an adult), and her own pregnancy, which closes All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’s loop of inheritance and rebirth.

The issue, then, isn’t Jackson’s elision of conventional storytelling devices; if anything, the film’s relaxed rhythms and oblique narrative effectively key us in to its patchwork of memories unmoored from time. Rather, it’s the film’s refusal to vary from its quickly established tone of gentle, plaintive lyricism, which undercuts any attempt to capture the fullness of a life lived and the wildly divergent emotions that mark it. There’s no room for embarrassment, fear, anger, or any other counterpoint to its placid surfaces. Jackson relies on those “stinging moments”—Mack and Josie’s house burning down, the death of a loved one, an unfulfilled romance—but skimps on the details, rarely allowing them to exist as more than signposts in its jumbled timeline.

Comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick and Julie Dash are inevitable, but Jackson’s search for the sublime lacks both the rich philosophical inquiries of the former and the dense, lived-in specificity of the latter. If anything, there’s a manicured prettiness to the images in this film that feels closer to the work of Malick acolytes like David Lowery and David Gordon Green.

Perhaps a better comparison would be Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who similarly deprioritizes drama and psychology to achieve a serene harmony between his characters and their natural surroundings. But All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt also lacks Weerasethakul’s sense for the surreal and the mystical residing in the everyday, his subtle humor and brazen narrative gambits.

For all of this film’s patience and open-endedness, the emotions are counterproductively tied to vague and shopworn story elements. Jackson occasionally finds an image that lands, most often when she leans into abstraction or composes across her widescreen frame to full effect. But her reliance on a few visual signatures—enough close-ups of hands to make Robert Bresson blush, and nearly as many of the backs of heads—brings severely diminishing returns. The climactic image in particular comes perilously close to recycling the hoariest of indie clichés.

The film’s centerpiece sequence features Mack and Wood reconnecting in young adulthood, a gulf of unspoken history separating them, including Wood having since married. The camera holds on their embrace for close to 10 minutes, in the clearest application of the principles of slow cinema to Jackson’s own perspective. But the scene never quite moves past the conceptual and into the realm of transcendent feeling that it’s aiming for. As such, it works as a microcosm of All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt as a whole, a work of lofty ambitions built on a foundation of clay.