Undescribable Perfection

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

I came across this movie while flipping channels in a hotel room while attending a course in Copenhagen in 2001, didn't know the name or the actors so searched online to find out because it was so moving. The story and acting are excellent, but what blew me away were the long slow shots of the boat and people drifting through the swamps of the flooded river -- very beautiful. Seems odd to demand 10 lines of text in a comment on a movie that's all about silence, but if that's what's required, I guess I can do it. Not quite yet, don't know if I'll be able to make it. So I'll just repeat: Seems odd to demand 10 lines of text in a comment on a movie that's all about silence.

Just like when Jed Clampett was out shootin' for some food, I thought that I'd watch this movie because I was hungry to see every single version of William Faulkner's fiction put to film. I expected possum stew, but, lo and behold, this was quite the bubblin' crude. I mean, who would expect such a high quality movie to be made for television, a Hallmark Hall of Fame production, at that? Well, the script was written by Horton Foote, most famous, I imagine, for his script for To Kill a Mockingbird. The original story is half of Faulkner's masterpiece If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, which brilliantly alternates between the stories Old Man and The Wild Palms (a name by which the novel has also been known). The Wild Palms is the better half of the novel, I think most people would agree. It's a tragedy about a woman who leaves her husband for a young man studying to become a doctor. The resulting scandal forces them to wander around the country, and the story ends with the gravest tragedy. Old Man, on the other hand, is a comedy. Where The Wild Palms presents a sickly and pained relationship, Old Man presents a parody of a marriage. A convict (Arliss Howard) is enlisted to help save people who are caught in the flood of 1927, perhaps the largest the United States has ever seen (it completely covered most of the South for miles on both sides of the Mississippi, and probably most other rivers, as well). He is specifically sent to rescue a young woman in a tree and a man stuck on top of the roof of a cotton house. Well, although he doesn't know how to control the boat, he does find the woman (Jeanne Tripplehorn). He never finds the man on the cotton house roof, but he does find the woman in the tree, and she's eight and a half months pregnant. They get lost on the giant lake which was the South. Though the opportunity for escape, for a whole new life presents itself almost constantly, Howard refuses to take it. He's stubborn; he only has nine more years to serve (for a silly, attempted train robbery that barely got off the ground), and, dammit, he's gonna serve them no matter what. The movie consists of little more than muted conversations between the chattering woman and the convict of few words. A kind of love arises between them. This doesn't happen the same way in the original story. In fact, my sense was that the convict, who had been in jail since the tender age of 19, had had no experience with women whatsoever and was downright afraid of both the woman and her baby, who is born in the first couple of days afloat. The comedy of this half of the novel is lessened and the work is made more dramatic. Without the tragedy of The Wild Palms, this actually works very well. The two lead performances are great. I would never expected this amount of depth from Tripplehorn, whose career has been middling at best. This proves her to be a viable actress. Arliss Howard, though I've seen him in a hundred movies, several of which are personal favorites, I do not recognize whatsoever. His performance in this film is nothing short of masterful, just magnificent.

I rented this movie adaptation of a William Faulkner short story on the reputation of the Nobel Prize winner. It was funded as a Made-for-TV Hallmark Hall of Fame and does deserve more attention, in my opinion. The plot does have some holes that you could drive a car through and the baby is unconvincing as a newborn but the Screenplay and Acting deserve high praise! This was well worth the unpleasant and sad emotions evoked by this view from the underside of rural America. The lead actors do great jobs portraying without stereotype the Southern down-on-their-luck poor folk who need each others' helping hands. I was startled and amazed that the film script kept in long passages of a minor character speaking Creole/French and didn't dumb down our following what was happening. Thanks for not underestimating the intellect of those who chose our video selections with some awareness that other languages were part of Southern culture of that time period. The evocative scene of the drifters floating through a church was a highly memorable point that I'll look back at again when I rent this video again. Kudos to the producers of such a sensitive and intelligently structured adaptation! Rating 9 *'s out of 10!

This story of a convict and a pregnant woman adrift in a small boat during a Mississippi flood. is well-handled. I haven't read the story by William Faulkner for years so I can't remember how closely it is followed. Good performances by Arliss Howard and Jeanne Tripplehorn.