Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen HEART OF THE MATTER A WESTERN THAT'S CREDIBLE HEARTLAND begins with some real slow, squeaky music, and it ends the same. In between, not much of anything happens. That's why I like it....
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.CK, JR...
...Clyde refashions the rough-hewn crib into a little coffin...
...Actually, you could say a lot happens...
...One morning toward the end of winter, Jerrine awakes to find her mother and Clyde in the other room standing over their baby in the wash basin...
...Later that spring, Ellie screams and falls to the ground while hanging out wash...
...One records the slaughter of a pig, the other the birth of a calf...
...Well, the winter is real, real hard, real bad...
...Then he can't get a decent price for his cattle...
...As me twentieth century moves ever faster and further away from the nineteenth, the hardships, the elementariness, even the emotions of the past become increasingly unimaginable to us...
...It's the second-to-last scene, and the emotion it makes us feel for the travail of this dumb beast shows just how far we have been drawn into the remote, inconceivable world Heartland depicts...
...Not only do half the cattle die (enough, almost, to wipe out ten years' work Clyde's put in building his herd), but the baby - the one Ellie had to deliver herself because Clyde couldn't find their ten-mile neighbor, Grandma (Lila Skala), in time - darned if that baby doesn't die, too...
...That's what Ferris and Pearce do, and Torn and Ferrell, too, with their inexpressive acting as if they were in a Robert Bresson film...
...Jack (Barry Primus), the hired hand to whom Jerrine is so partial, lights out for Mexico before the snow flies because Clyde's got no money left to pay him what's owing...
...Lines are mumbled, scenes cut short, and almost no exposition or elaboration provided...
...So, as I was saying, the truth is that a lot happens in this movie...
...But it all happens as if nothing is happening...
...By sticking to the latter, Heartland displays modesty that takes a certain courage...
...You better learn before winter comes," Grandma advises in her own terse fashion...
...The result is the only sort of Western that's at all credible any more, one in which the actions shown are not the high, rare drama of gunfights and derring-do, but the most commonplace experiences conceivable...
...The only solution is to tell a story as simple and unassuming as you can possibly make it...
...It makes a certain sense...
...The train that brings Ellie and Jerrine up to Wyoming at the beginning of the film moves as slowly as the music...
...Eleanor (Conchata Ferrell) and her daughter Jerrine (Megan Folsom) come all the way up to Wyoming to housekeep for Clyde Stewart (Rip Torn), a rancher...
...This lack of style in the movie is of course a style all its own...
...He refuses to sell the two-year-olds, but that means he's got to keep them over the winter - a task that needs seventy ton of hay where he's only got fifty on hand...
...When she sees that the infant, which had had a fever, is completely submerged in the water, head and all, Jerrine gets kind of wide-eyed, but stays mum...
...Clyde's proposal to Ellie some weeks later represents about the third and fourth sentences, respectively, that he's spoken to her since she arrived...
...Indeed, it represents a degree of honesty and truth-in-telling...
...Next thing she knows, he's got her thinking she can't go it alone and ought to marry him, which she does...
...Next thing he knows, she's gone and filed on the homestead section adjoining his...
...Clyde steps over to the stable door to see what's going on, and then just turns back to his chores again after assuring Jerrine her mother is going to be all right now...
...How intense its commitment to realism is can be seen in two scenes that are pure documentary of ranch life...
...In a sense, this is the denouement of the film...
...This is a direction in which the Western has been going for some years now, becoming a kind of minimal art...
...It's dead-pan Altman...
...We can just tell from the way the cars creak across the prairie that nothing is going to happen sudden-like...
...And Clyde is such a taciturn Scotsman, as stingy with his words as he is with wages, that nobody can get much of a reaction out of him, either...
...At one point when Ellie is helping with the chuck wagon while Jack and Clyde round up Grandma's cattle, Ellie complains to Grandma, "I just can't talk to that man," meaning Clyde...
...Ellie shows no emotion whatsoever...
...In the second scene, Clyde and Ellie have to assist by getting ropes around the calf while it's still in the uterus and literally pulling it into the world by its heels...
...Both the script by Beth Ferris and the direction by Richard Pearce subscribe to the theory that the only way to deal with the past is to make it baffling, to obscure and limit our image of it...
Vol. 108 • October 1981 • No. 18
