Tim McCann's All Mistakes Buried combines two popular indie genres (Sad Bastard and Low-Budget Crime) without ever quite becoming its own thing. Sonny (Sam Trammell) is a hunky Southern tweaker who gets the idea into his meth-addled head that if he acquires just the right necklace from a pawnshop, it'll save his marriage to his estranged wife Gale (Maria McCann). Losing the ill-gotten bauble promptly after stealing it sends Sonny on a journey into the local criminal nightlife — populated primarily by people of color, obviously — while he flashes back to his previous life as a mildly respectable but still wholly dickish business owner, trying to figure out what went wrong in the first place. The picture is mostly interesting as an experiment in non-linear storytelling; it's told entirely from Sonny's point of view, with a fractured timeline and a thoroughly unreliable narrator, which makes it more compelling than had it just been a more straightforward crime story. Indeed, since it's somewhat lacking in character development, the formalistic elements are ultimately all that recommends the elliptical All Mistakes Buried,including a recurring use of the 1932 Marian Anderson spiritual "Poor Me." It perfectly encapsulates the self-pity found in addicts like Sonny who blame others for the holes they've dug themselves.
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