Sorry, this movie sucks

Let's be realistic.

just watch it!

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Back in the 1950s, "The Trip to Bountiful" was a very successful stage play. I mention this because the film is a bit slower than many movies and it's easy to imagine it being performed live...much of it because the film has quite a few monologues. This is NOT a complaint....and I really enjoyed the picture...even if it's a bit of a downer at times.When the film begins, Mrs. Watts (Geraldine Page) is living with her adult son (John Heard) and his god-awful wife, Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn). Jessie Mae is a very controlling and nasty lady and she seems to go out of her way to make Mrs. Watts feel like she isn't wanted. Oddly, she also doesn't necessarily want her to leave, either! In fact, Jessie Mae just seems to like complaining and making everyone miserable. As for her husband, Ludie is a wimp who wants everyone to get along but allows his wife to make the household tense. Within this atmosphere, Mrs. Watts has a strong desire to leave...not permanently, but to visit her old home town of Bountiful. While this seems like a reasonable thing, especially since Mrs. Watts is elderly and has a heart condition, Jessie Mae insists that she is not ALLOWED to make the trip...and that is that! Well, Mrs. Watts knows the only way to make this one last trip is to sneak off on her own...and she does.What follows is a long and leisurely film where Mrs. Watts meets several nice folks...nice folks who take the time to listen to her prattle on and on. It's obvious that no one has been listening to her...and she is making up for lost time! So what happens? See the film.The reason to see this film is the acting. Geraldine Page is delightful and I can see why she earned the Oscar for Best Actress. But I also thought that Carlin Glynn was also terrific. After all, I really, really wanted to throttle her...and she and the director did a great job in creating a strong emotional reaction in viewers. A nice character study and a film that might just make you shed a few tears...so have some Kleenex handy.

This is acting legend Geraldine Page's final Oscar-winning performance at the age of 61, after harvesting eight nominations during her renowned silver-screen career, and she passed away two years later in 1987. So Ms. Close, don't give up your hope yet, please live long and prosper.THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL is an adaptation of Horton Foote's eponymous play, sets in Houston in 1940s, Mrs. Watts (Page) lives with her son Ludie (Heard) and his wife Jessie Mae (Glynn) in a two-room apartment, for almost two decades, Mrs. Matts tries to visit her hometown, Bountiful, an obsolete town being forgotten by any train or bus schedule, for the last time, however, Ludie and Jessie Mae can always pre-empt her plan in the past years, this time, after a sleepless night and the quotidian spat with Jessie Mae, plus a sinking spell may indicate that she has some heart problem, Ms. Watts ramps up all the courage and she must go back to Bountiful on her own, with the pension check she smartly concealed from Jessie Mae.Luck is also on her side, finally, she dodges Ludie and Jessie Mae's search in the bus station and befriends with her fellow passenger Thelma (De Mornay), a young married girl whose husband is dispatched to the war zone, on the bus to the nearest town from Bountiful. A quasi mother-daughter bond builds tenderly while they confide their stories en route. When Thelma leaves for her destination, Mrs. Watts stays over in the local station until the Sheriff (Bradford) arrives to inform her that Ludie will fetch her up at the morning. Out of despair, Ms. Watts plead the Sheriff to drive her to Bountiful, allow her to see her old house for the last time before Ludie arrives.This is a featherweight indie picture, with a handful of actors, spanning merely two nights and two days, Page's Mrs. Watts is always in the centre of the story, she is a country girl in spirit, crammed in a small apartment and crashes with an ultra-selfish Jessie Mae in every possible way (the hymn, the pout and the gait), as she pointedly confesses to Thelma - when you have a son, when he marries, you lose a son, but if you have a daughter, when she marries, you get a son! She is too benign to defy Jessie Mae since Ludie is a weak- minded man, a mother's self-sacrifice is inbuilt, her longing for the land where raises her is the only getaway from a grating reality. Ms. Page pitches at every note of emotions precisely in her warm and endearing performance, looks rather older than her real age, she doesn't possess any idiosyncrasy or appeal to be a figure under the spotlight, Mrs. Watts is such an ordinary old woman one can meet everyday and pay no attention of, but thanks to Foote's very personal and unostentatious script, her mere dream is amplified into a universally affecting pursuit of fulfilment, particularly edifying for us, as our parents are in the same range of Mrs. Watts, homesick, nostalgia and past memories become all they have in the world. In retrospect, it is rather astonishing to realise from Houston to Bountiful it only takes more or less 10-12 hours by driving, how come Ludie never brings his mother to visit for once is quite baffling, he is not that callous kind. John Heard's acting is not at the same clique as Page's not only because Ludie is a pretty dislikable character in default, his only great moment is his big confession scene, otherwise, he is a bland actor. Carlin Glynn's Jessie Mae, on the other hand, excruciatingly hammy, but frankly speaking, Glynn saves the day by injecting a patina of self-awareness which underlines maybe Jessie Mae is not a complete damaged good, she is an egocentric virago for sure, but she is not the evil kind, she is not entirely hostile towards Mrs. Watts, her life is also stuck in a stifled status quo, sometimes we stupidly and unintentionally discharge our dissatisfaction towards those who are near us, it's just human nature, no misogynous overtone is agitated. In a word, THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL is Ms. Page's showpiece to the hilt, a star-making device aiming for that golden statue and it succeeds, but you could say it is a fair play, and in 2014 a TV remake with a core black cast with Cicely Tyson, Vanessa Williams and Blair Underwood, verifies that this old yarn is still relevant nowadays.

Geraldine Page won an Academy Award as Best Actress for her role in the Horton Foote drama, "A Trip To Bountiful," about a widowed woman living with her son and his wife played memorably by Carlin Glynn in Texas. She yearns for one last trip back to Bountiful which is a dying town. She meets Rebecca DeMornay, a fellow traveler, and they bond. The most interesting scenes are when she tries to escape her son's apartment and go to the bus station. All she wants is one trip to Bountiful before she dies. When she gets there, it's more of a ghost town or cemetery than a town itself. She has to convince others of her quest for one last trip to Bountiful before she goes.

It's hard to rate this film, numerically, because the performance of the late Geraldine Page is so dazzling and utterly absorbing, that her glow makes it almost impossible to see the defects of the film.It's a neat, tidy, well-constructed drama, with a careful concentration on a single, simple story, and manages to make us care and worry about all the little mishaps in the plot. It's colorful, well-paced, gorgeously costumed and designed, and (assuming that you're not too cynical to enjoy a sentimental story for what it is) it's a totally absorbing and compelling two hours.Most of the characters of the drama are complicated enough to keep the film from getting too predictable, and certainly, in the hands of the great Geraldine Page, it would be hard for character NOT to be deeply interesting. Mrs. Watts is somewhat similar to Cousin "Sook" in the beautiful Truman Capote memoirs Miss Page performed in the late 1960's, but she has far richer monologues throughout the film that could not better underline her extraordinary skills.However, in spite of all this, I think the film is rather lacking in substance. It's QUITE sentimental, and while it never degenerates into a lament for the snows of yesteryear, it comes pretty close to it. Although there is some resolution of family tensions toward the end of the story, we never really get a terribly convincing demonstration of HOW the title's "trip to Bountiful" managed to bring this resolution about.For that, I tend to fault the screenplay--and perhaps I'll feel differently about it after another viewing.But that alone is characteristic: my wish to see it again at some point is PURELY because I want to admire Geraldine Page--and NOT because I found the story and film so moving. It's HER that I wish to watch, not the film.And so, I guess, as a compromise, I'll give it 8 stars...but everybody should understand I have two extra stars in parentheses for the star of the movie who could not have been a more deserving recipient of an Oscar that year.