On Stage
MERKIN, DAPHNE
On Screen A SMALL GEM BY DAPHNE MERKIN Increasingly of late, it seems to me the only intelligent thing to do in the face of that modern behemoth known as the movie industry is lie down and submit...
...Ludie's wife is not caricatured to the point of being, a "bad" person...
...Spurred by my failure to catch Dreamchild (whose leading performer, Coral Browne, is now being considered for an Academy Award nomination), I rushed off to see The Trip to Bountiful on a blustery Christmas Eve...
...Carrie Watts (Geraldine Page) lives with her son, Ludie (John Heard), and her daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn), in a cramped Houston apartment...
...no one dies...
...its usage is a further delineation of her character and of the year the movie is set in, 1947...
...Perhaps the medium has moved beyond the grasp of so antiquated a mechanism as the individual reviewer recollecting his or her thoughts in tranquillity...
...My hands," this irrepressibly nostalgic woman declares, "feel the need of dirt...
...Referring to Bountiful as having been "quiteprosperous," Carrie puts the viewer in mind of a period when the phrase signified a state of emotion no less than material well-being...
...Her Carrie is a full-bodied creation, a character she quite literally inhabits...
...Apparently, while it may pay to gamble on shooting a Dream-child or a Trip to Bountiful—the "small" film usually being inexpensively accou-tered and modest in its technical demands—it doesn't pay to promote the genre...
...When he says he doesn't she responds, "I do," and then, with an almost girlish giggle of embarrassment, she adds, "Well, of course,/would.' It is an illuminating flicker of a revelation: We are all keepers of very private flames, of people and places that would be extinguished forever without our remembering them...
...What does happen happens the way things usually happen in life—imperceptibly: Realizing that her glimpse of Bountiful will have to sustain her back in Houston, that she can't run free in the tall grass as she once did, Carrie gets into the car with Ludie and Jessie Mae, who havechased after her...
...For different reasons, Ludie and Jessie Mae have been immovably opposed to the idea of Carrie returning to Bountiful...
...If there is no dramatic volte-face in Bountiful, there are plenty of moments which reveal the subtle workings of personality, the tiny shifts of perspective that open up unforeseen psychological vistas...
...When Carrie explains how she has derived strength from "the smell of the gulf, from that, not houses, or people" one is convinced Geraldine Page is inhaling a lost, salty aroma even as she says the words...
...She sleeps—or, to be accurate, fails to sleep—on the living-room couch...
...Jessie Mae can't abide her mother-in-law's hymn-singing or what she contemptuously refers to as "pouting," by which she means Carrie's retreats into the sanctuary of contemplation...
...What might have been rendered, in less artistic hands, as a saccharine Triumph of the Spirit, a lear-jerking "liberation of theelderly," becomes instead something less noisy and more resonant: a meditation on the power of memory...
...I especially liked John Heard as the cloudy Ludie, a handsome man going to paunch (Heard's profile reminded me, fittingly, of F. Scott Fitzgerald's...
...the movie, however, is not one of those stage-to-screen transformations where the original roots show jarringly under the new coloration...
...I had always presumed the big hurdle was securing the actual shooting budget...
...The other members of the cast are similarly, if less awe-inspiringly, good...
...for another, it is set in a deliberately minor key...
...Her idea of the good life is meeting a girlfriend in a drugstore for Cokes and gossip, as Carrie points out to Thelma (Rebecca De Mornay), the young girl, who befriends her on the bus trip across Texas after her "escape...
...Still, I wonder...
...no one breaks down or declares their great love...
...You have only to find yourself, as I did recently, in a conversation with an industry insider (in this case a maker of "videos," that stepchild spawned by the mother form) to discover how mysterious a process producing films really is...
...Late at night she sits up in a faded old robe, stray wisps of white hair escaping from her topknot, and sings hymns under her breath, nursing herlonging...
...Carrie's yearning for an idealized past is set against the humiliation of her present circumstances—staying with a son who is kindly yet ineffectual and a daughter-in-law whose chronic intolerance reduces the old lady to tears...
...Later, after listening to a bus depot manager (Kevin Cooney) explain the differences between his two sons, Carrie comments with great conviction, "I know of other cases likethat— onedrinks, the other doesn't...
...No one confesses to anything heinous in this movie...
...In a scene toward the end, Carrie asks the compassionate sheriff (Richard Bradford) who drives her the remaining 12 miles to the deserted spot where her family house just barely stands whether he remembers her father...
...First, though, the daughter-in-law reads off a list of household rules Carrie is to abide by from now on—no more hymn-singing, no more pouting, no more running away...
...One can easily see how Bountiful must have made a wonderful piece of theater...
...once that was cleared, I thought, the rest was smooth going...
...Rebecca De Mornay, whom I last saw as the enterprising call girl in Risky Business, portrays the sweet-natured traveling companion, with commendable naturalness...
...This one of a forgetful yet eminently wily old lady demands to its limits the expressiveness Page has always been able to call upon with ease, and she is in complete command...
...Many of her past roles have struck me as being too small to contain her...
...Geraldine Page is extraordinary as Carrie Watts...
...Unperturbed, Carrie leans over and kisses Jessie Mae, throwing her off guard and surprising a look out of her that we have never seen before—a look of genuine amazement...
...Written by Horton Foote and directed by Peter Masterson, it is an artfully faceted film cut to catch the light...
...For one thing, it is a bit "literary...
...Having aired my pessimistic thoughts, let me grasp—antiquated mechanism that I am—at the luck that nevertheless occasionally befalls a critic...
...But there is something definitely Southern about the air of nostalgia and the sense of human im-plausibility...
...Although all of the arts, from the most privatized (poetry) to the most public (theater), depend for their existence upon a complex interplay of Culture and Commerce, the relation of the one to the other appears particularly inscrutable when it comes to the cinema...
...During the course of a discussion about the painfully brief life span of the sort of movie that is as serious in its intentions as it is quiet in its execution, I learned that the financial problems besetting these films occur after they are made...
...I have a sneaking suspicion I am not doing any movie a favor— at least not in the eyes of the general public—by calling it a "gem," but The Trip to Bountiful is precisely that...
...and Richard Bradford as the unexpectedly accommodating law officer...
...On Screen A SMALL GEM BY DAPHNE MERKIN Increasingly of late, it seems to me the only intelligent thing to do in the face of that modern behemoth known as the movie industry is lie down and submit graciously...
...Its scope is intentionally small—the plot revolves, more or less, around a bus ride—yet it casts a more luminescent glow than movies twice its size and three times as glossy...
...What it comes down to, then, is this: People who want their entertainment to come on strong, who like movies to jostle them in their seats, will undoubtedly be disappointed...
...It would be untrue to say The Trip to Bountiful will suit all tastes...
...I note the predictably approving reviews for Out of Africa, or the endless staying power of After Hours (a literal journey to the end of the night set in preppie land, not so much a bad movie as an inchoate one), and I wonder: Does serious criticism really have a place here, as it does— albeit minimally—in the realm of books and paintings...
...That is not to suggest the movie plays as if it were a Southern novel, since even Southern novels generally have more action or grotesque incident...
...But the most interesting aspect of this film for me is the way it persistently eludes its own looming aura of sentimentality...
...Itisclear that her falsely invoked claim to authority is meant to be a form of seduction, an attempt to humor the manager into ignoring the sheriff's orders and letting her leave the station...
...Not so, I was told: The reason a recent movie like Dreamchild disappeared, withinamat-ter of days (before I could get to see it) despite a rave review in the New York Times, and a movie such as The Trip to Bountiful will probably vanish from reel life before this review sees the light of print, has to do with the costs of distribution and publicity...
...It began life in 1953, as a teleplay on NBC featuring Lillian Gish, and opened that same year on Broadway with Miss Gish again in the role of Carrie Watts, the indomitable old lady who is its central character...
...The Trip to Bountiful depends for its effect on corresponding attention from the audience...
...Such quiet insight is only possible when everyone is as attentive to nuance as the writer, director and actors involved with this film...
...People who prefer their entertainment on an intimate scale, who enjoy films that clarify life rather than divert them from it, should make the trip to Bountiful...
...Bountiful has an interesting history...
...The nature of that longing—the exact, fierce feel of it—is what The Trip to Bountiful is achingly about: Carrie wants to go home, back to the tiny rural outpost with the hopeful misnomer of a name where she was born and bred...
...How shecatches a bus going in the general direction of her hometown— the ingenuity she displays meeting the most intractable obstacles, including the fact that Bounti ful no longer exists— is fascinating to watch, by turns comic and desperate...
...Carlin Glynn as the irascible Jessie Mae...
...The response to both productions soon raised the possibility of adapting the script for the screen, even though three decades had passed when the project finally materialized in 1984...
...Film is, after all, the most massive and mass-oriented art form, the one least geared to individual response...
...Every now and then, I realize, there is a fortuitous collision of the forces that be, and Culture and Commerce become bedfellows...
...she is simply fatally unimaginative...
Vol. 69 • January 1986 • No. 1
