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BY KIM MORGAN
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Hands on a Hard Body Rated PG Opens Friday, Oct. 30 Though the title sounds provocative, Hands on a Hard Body has nothing to do with sex. It has nothing to do with weight lifting, aerobics or football either. It does, however, have everything to do with strength, endurance and the power of the human will. And it is provocative, surprisingly so considering that the movie's central character is a brand new, fully loaded Nissan pickup truck. Directed by 28-year-old Texan S.R. Bindler, Hands on a Hard Body is one of the most fascinating and significant documentaries to come out of Texas--or anywhere--in decades. The event chronicled appears simple at first: In the summer of 1995, a Nissan dealership in the small community of Longview is staging its annual contest, the winner of which gets to drive home in the aforementioned truck--a prized possession in Texas. Out of thousands of entries, 24 contestants are chosen to do exactly what the contest's title suggests: Keep their hands on the hard body. Given breaks of only five minutes each hour, the contestants must keep one hand on the truck at all times. They can't squat, lean or be a fraction of a second late from their respite. No matter how many hours or days it takes, the last man/woman standing wins the truck. How hard can it be just to stand around? As the movie proves, extremely hard. With a wonderfully straightforward yet intricately complex style, Bindler and crew capture the multiple personalities, philosophies and realities of the film's very human characters. Funny and at times even hilarious, HOAHB manages to make the viewer laugh at the down-home characters without ever being condescending or exploitative. In fact, we end up empathizing with and growing connected to these people. The colorful group includes Kelli, a twentyish Sandra Bullock look-alike who wishes to sell the truck so she can pay bills, go to school and get braces; Norma, a devout Christian who laughs hysterically when moved by the Spirit; and Benny, a tough, smart good ol' boy whose win the year before makes him the film's wise philosopher. "If you can't hunt with the big dogs," he says, "you get on the porch with the pups." Finally there's Janis, an older woman with missing upper teeth and a husband who's missing his lower teeth. In preparation, she's stayed up four nights without air-conditioning--or as her husband calls it, her "air," which is at one point revealed to emanate from a 20-ton cooling unit installed in their home. The toothless hubby explains that most people have a 3-ton unit, but he has "enough air to cool a K-Mart store." He got it for cheap, and it works great, even if they once chilled their home down to 15 below zero--"enough to kill you." Like any good suspense story, Bindler's portrait has a beginning, a middle and an exciting end, and we sit on the edge of our seats until the surprising outcome. Moving, disturbing and life-affirming, Hand on a Hard Body is all that Benny philosophically proclaims the contest to be: "This spectacle seems so absurd...you have to realize later, it's a human drama thing. It's more than just a contest. It's more than just winning a truck." It certainly is.
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