Northfork - Subdued Surreality

my rating:

These Polish brothers are taking the box office by storm in a drama with a heavy metaphysical subtext, with black-suited agents and people who exist in two different realities. That's the Wachowskis and The Matrix films I'm talking about, but if you replace "taking the box office by storm" with "telling a story about a flood", it could refer to Mark and Michael Polish, the creators of Northfork.

The movie tells two interwoven stories, set in 1955 in the doomed rural town of Northfork, Montana, which is to be flooded in a matter of days by a newly completed hydro-electric dam.

One story is about several duos of evacuators, men hired by the government to get the remaining residents of Northfork to leave their homes, for which they (the evacuators) may be compensated with lakefront property. That story is laced with carefully understated and dark - but wacky - humor, playing the black-Ford-sedan-driving black-fedora-wearing government agents (particular the duo played by James Woods and his son Mark Polish), off against colorful locals, such as the bigamist and his wives who have converted their home into a small ark.

The other story revolves around a sickly young orphan who may or may not be something other than what he appears to be. Nick Nolte plays the priest who remains to care for him, hoping against hope to find someone to take him away. And then there's the quartet of markedly odd characters (including Daryl Hannah and Anthony Edwards) who - if they are real - are not of this world. This story is laced with mystery and overt surrealism. It's tempting to dismiss it as the fevered imaginings of the boy (and if you watch and listen carefully there's plenty to suggest exactly that), but it intrudes just enough into the other story to make that a little too simple an answer.

Not that there's a clear dividing line between the two plotlines. There's more than a little quirky humor in the orphan's tale and surreal spirituality in the evacuators' adventures. The whole film has a very distant and subdued tone; there's no chewing of the scenery, and the action is infrequent. Nolte in particular nearly whispers many of his lines, to the point of sometimes being unintelligible. But it's never truly dark, and has absurdity intermixed into every scene.

The movie begs for a philisophical or religious analysis. It's loaded with religious imagery and symbolism, including a vacated cemetary, angel wings, a church on blocks ready to be moved (the back wall missing), a man with nails through his feet, the myopic scrutiny of ostensibly-prophetic texts, a Mormon-esque zealot, a cross-shaped outhouse window, evacuators going out in twos like missionaries, and of course the ark and the coming flood. Given several viewings, I could have a field day with this.

But tonight was the final showing, because this movie by Polish brothers is only playing at the town art-film house, for one week only. Maybe after it comes out on tape. In the meantime, I'm not ready to declare it a masterpiece (although visually it certainly qualifies, I'm still not sure about the story) but it's definitely engrossing... in its own detached sort of way.