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Review:
There are not a lot of quality films or television series
about young men, and the most interesting of these vary from “Smallville” to “Spider Man” all the way to “Queer As
Folk” (here, Harry Potter doesn’t count). So along comes an outdoor farm
drama, shot mostly on location in Nebraska
(also Iowa) about the end of
adolescence. The look and tone of the film remind me of David Lynch’s “The Straight Story.” Here, the setup seems rather static: two
brothers, apparently in their early twenties, seem indistinguishable at first
glance but quickly seem to grow apart, and their difference becomes a bit of
a mystery. The story is told from the point of view of Tully, an attractive
kind of Romeo who gets his hands and arms dirty and cut up
often enough on the farm and doesn’t seem to be moving on. His
interest in young ladies, like Ella (Julianne Nicholson), when she returns to
the “countryside” from college, seems natural and restrained enough, yet it
seems to drive away his more reserved and laconic younger brother Earl (Glenn
FitzGerald), whom you eventually find out is
actually straight (pun intended) too.
Both have been raised by an apparently widowed father, and their
family starts to unveil its secrets one day when the dad receives a
hand-delivered letter threatening foreclosure of his farm—but it’s not just
because of farm prices.
The film really kept me engaged in the characters, noticing
all the little details: The
movie reference to “The Trouble with Harry,” the Marky Mark-like appearance of Tully when he takes off his
shirt (the camera angles seem to make a 50s –style slam with the hairlessness
of his chest), the voluptuous farm scenery (almost as rich as in “Signs”),
the George Elliot-like denouement of the plot. Is there a dead hand here? The
end result is a film that looks big and carries the viewer along its
mysteries with a Hitchcock-like focus.
Winter Solstice (2005, Paramount Classics/Sound Pictures, dir.
and wr. Josh Sternfeld,
R, 93 min) presents a widower Jim Winters (Anthony LaPaglia)
with two teenage sons (Gabe, played by Aaron
Stanford, who looks a bit more grizzled and scraggly in this film than he did
in Tadpole, especially in the cagey lake swimming scene, and Pete,
played by Mark Webber). Gabe wants to get his adult
life moving by moving to Florida (Tampa) and becoming a boat bum of sorts,
whereas Pete, who wears a hearing aide, sloughs off high school and has to repeat
courses in summer school. Ron
Livingston is the philosophical history teacher who can get students into
things like why the Mongels did not move on and
capture all of Europe when they could have. Allison Janey plays Molly, a female paralegal and jeweler-artist
wannabe who could become a second wife some day, but the film doesn’t take
that too far. The story is told visually, in simple dialogue, but tends to
leave a lot of loose ends. Yet this was intentional, a slice of life. The
film makes an interesting comparison to some shows about teens on TheWB, especially One Tree Hill and Everwood. The title of the movie is metaphorical
(imdb.com shows two other unrelated films with this title), as most of the
film seems to take place in the fall and spring. I attended a screening at
the 2005 DC International Film Festival and the Landmark E-Street Cinema, and
the director was present for questions.
An Unfinished Life
(2005/2003, Miramax/Revolution, dir. Lsse Halstrom, 102 min, PG-13) was one of the last releases
from the old Miramax, and it reportedly sat on the shelf for two years. It
comes from a production studio that usually works for Sony/Columbia. An
autumn release, it bears some visual semblance to the more “notorious” Brokeback Mountain, which also happens in Wyoming (near Ishawooa) (and was filmed in the Canadian Rockies). In
fact, this film is full wide screen and looks even more “real” visually. But
it is more a film to watch than experience. It is slow moving and character
centered and illustrative, like a Lifetime
movie. Jean Gilkyson (Jennifer Lopez) brings her
daughter Griff (Becca
Gardner) back to her father-in-law’s dilapidated ranch. Einar
(a very ripe Robert Redford) lives with his injured hand Mitch (Morgan
Freeman), who was mauled by a grizzly bear some time back. The grizzly, in
fact, creates the first image in the movie. Jean will be chased by a
mean-minded Gary (Damian Lewis) and Josh Lucas rounds out the cast as the
sheriff. The tragic story Jean’s husband’s death will occur in conversation,
as will the bear mauling. A major subplot will be to free the bear and
release him (“Bart the Bear”) back into the wild. In one scene, Griff speculates about lesbians and suggests that Einar and Mitch could be gay lovers. But the story
doesn’t go anywhere with that line.
Sweet Land
(2005, Libero/Forward/Beautiful, dir. Ali Selim, 110 min, PG, English and German) is a period
piece, post WWI, set around Montevideo, MN.
Since I lived in Minneapolis for
six years (1997-2003) and participated with IFPMSP, I recognized some of the
credits. The other important thing here is that the story is about the
meaning of marriage, which here is arranged, and about all the things people
in a community had to do to live together, even if they were prejudiced.
Here, in retrospect, Inge (Elisabeth Reager) arrives from Germany as the arranged bride for Olaf (Tim Guinee) but the
Lutheran pastor (John Heard) won’t marry them because she speaks only German
(which is rendered without subtitles) and because she comes from an enemy
country. Worse, she is a socialist. Even though this area of the country is
liberal now, we see a society of friends and enemies, where alien ideas are
rejected. (At one point, a leaflet opposing conscription occurs, which would
have violated Woodrow Wilson’s sedition laws in the era.) There is a subplot,
reminiscent of the Tully film, about an auction foreclosure of a farm. But we
come back again to seeing this film as a statement about how marriage was a
means to social validation, a way of establishing a domain that allowed a man
to carry out his obligations.
Sarah, Plain and Tall (1991, Hallmark,
dir. Glenn Jordan, novel by Patricia MacClanahan,
98 min, G) is another, simpler story about “arranged” (of sorts) marriage and
“growing into love” in a bare bones world that offers limited choices. In
1910, a widower Jacob Witting, living on the frontier near Hays, Kansas,
writes an newspaper ad for a bride to help raise his
two kids. Sarah Wheaton, a mature spinster who seems like a teacher, comes
from Maine on the train (on
car) and settles in. As all women on the frontier, she had to find her own
way to be independent, and she challenges Jacob’s sorrow over his loss of the
first wife, which we learn was during childbirth. After a tornado and a
neighbor’s childbirth, they finally have “learned to fall in love.” Again,
the film is being shown on cable right before the 2006 elections, with all of
the debate over the “meaning” of marriage. This was a world that would have
had no place for someone like me; you simply had to fit in to what was
expected of you as a man (or a woman). The script makes it clear that on the
farm, children of both genders were an economic necessity. The dog and vocal cat (which she brings in
a box) do get along. The movie has two sequels: a 1993 film with the title
suffix "Skylark" and a
1999 sequel with the title suffix ‘Winter’s
End.” The second film has Sarah
going back to Maine with the
kids (“back to what I knew first,” as one of the kids writes in a diary) for
a while after dry lightning destroys much of the farm in a drought. In the
third film. An old man shows up on the farm in March (1918?) who purports to
be Jacob’s father, with a long hidden history of Tully-like family secrets.
Another young man is wounded in World War I and returns. The three films do
show a gradual progress of technology (cars, phones, telegraph).
This Boy’s
Life (1993, Warner Bros., dir. Michael Caton-Jones,
115 min, R, book by Tobias Wolff) is one of Leonardo Di
Caprio’s first important films, here the
autobiographical boyhood of the author. Here his voice hasn’t quite changed
yet. His divorced mother (Ellen Barkin), in 1957,
moves them out west, eventually to Seattle,
where she meets concrete company owner Dwight (Robert De Niro)
who tries to make a “man” out of him as a Boy Scout. Thomas read’s a boy’s magazine that looks like “Boy’s Life.” Two
years later, Dwight won’t let his wife work for the Kennedy campaign because
most of the customers are Republicans. (That’s how people thought.) Though
the kids smoke and demonstrate their interest in girls with crude language,
one of his classmates, Chuck Bolger (Tobey Maguire) develops an interest in
him, kissing him at the piano in one scene in front of the family dog. To get
into Princeton, he will falsify his grades. He is rejected theren but he does
get to a prep school, which makes Dwight mad, and leads to an almost deadly
fight, since Dwight's sense of manhood has been eroded ("I did the best
I could." Tobias would still flunk out or prep school, but in the
endnotes the credits say that Vietnam made a man of him and he became a
famous literature professor. The film bears no relation to the gay “Boys
Life” franchise.
Seraphim
Falls (2007, Samuel Goldwyn / Destination / Icon, dir. David Van Ancken, 115 min, R) is an indie
“western” of the Shane variety, with mixed reviews and only a very minimal
theatrical release before the DVD came
out. Around 1870, former Union officer Gideon is on the run high in the Nevada
mountains (most of the film was shot in New Mexico,
some in Oregon). A personal
Confederate enemy Carver (Liam Neeson) with a
private posse is hunting him down, for killing his family during the war
(shown in very quick flashbacks only). An odyssey of escape and reconciliation
follows. Gideon is shot in the shoulder, but escapes over the falls, to dig
out the bullet himself. Gradually, he comes into contact with forces from
Carver and perhaps supernatural forces like Madame Louise Fair (Angelica
Houston) and will have a faceoff in the desert, in
an expansive scene that curiously reminds one of “Gerry”. Will the idea of
forgiveness overtake the need for revenge or personal justice? Expansive
mountain and desert photography and an emotional music score by Harry Gregson-Williams gives the film an epic quality,
recreating the psychological westerns of the 50s. This film shows how much
can be done today on a small budget. The title of the movie is obviously a
metaphor (moving from snowy Cascade-like mountains to desert, where water
goes from a threat to a life-saver) as well as literal reference to the
opening. “Seraphim” used to be the low-budget record label for Angel Records
(EMI).
3:10 to Yuma
(2007, Lions Gate / Relativity / Tree Line, dir. James Mangold,
117 min, R). Here is another good example of big stars getting together to
make an indie “art western,” again with expansive
scenery and a big look (even if a moderate budget), and a real face off at
the end. Dan Evans (Christian Bale) has lost a leg in the Civil War and struggles
on a ranch in northern Arizona (the film was shot in New Mexico, more or less
in the Sandia mountains; there is plenty of snow).
He picks up a man wounded in an ambush by Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) who has
just held up a railroad payroll, and takes him to Bisbee. He gets hired with
a posse to take Wade to take Wade to the train station in Contention to catch
a train to Yuma (down in the low
country) where he will be executed. There are plenty of perils, from Indians
and from Wade’s boys, and Evans’s precocious
teenage son William (Logan Lerman) sneaks out to
accompany the posse and winds up playing hero. There is a fascinating
sequence where a tunnel is being blasted, and where Wade is almost executed
once (he is tortured with electricity). Great looking steam train at the end,
even if it could fit on a kid’s model railroad. The final confrontation may
remind some viewers of High Noon, but this film is a remake of a 1957 western
classic. The film reminds modern viewers of legal issues, like due process, that
probably did not mean as much in the 19th Century (the 14th
Amendment had been passed);
in those days, a lot of justice was a lot more private. (It
reminds me of the “vigilante” issue with some of Dateline’s work.) One of the
year’s best films, and once again arthouse fare may
get in the Oscar race for best picture.
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