Retratos de uma Realidade

'Cross Creek' (1983) The story of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her life in the backwoods Florida town of Cross Creek after moving there from New York in the 1930's to continue her writing. I have been a visitor to her home in Cross Creek and even today the area looks like it probably did 60 years ago. Mary Steenburgen does a nice job as the independent, hard drinking Rawlings and Peter Coyote is fine as Norton Baskin, who eventually became her husband. Nicely photographed with a lovely musical score, 'Cross Creek'is a slow, easy going movie and the viewer will enjoy the people in Ms. Rawlings life, particularly the always steady Rip Torn and the late Dana Hill. An enjoyable experience.

No, I don't think Cross Creek will ever be put up there with Kane or Casablanca, but for some reason I made a connection with this movie the first time I saw it 20 years ago, and it remains one of my favorite films even today.

Every creative person goes through the struggle to find their voice, and Cross Creek is about a city-bred writer who runs away to the country to live an ascetic life with her typewriter. She expects her isolation and alienation to "prod the muses" but instead finds these new people and this new land to draw her in until they and it become the soul of her writing.

The natural, understated tone of the film allowed for a human resonance I've rarely seen in mainstream Hollywood fare. And while Mary Steenburgen and Peter Coyote are perfectly fine, Rip Torn and Alfre Woodard's performances absolutely floored me. They respectively brought Marsh Turner and Geechee to life with such abandon and clarity, it's some of the finest acting I've witnessed on film, period.

I revisit Cross Creek every few years and it always holds up stylistically (Leonard Rosenman's score is timeless). Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings symbolizes America itself, in my opinion, so concerned with pleasing its own, yet progressively exposed to a foreign world that ultimately will shape its real identity.

It's a universally human story and, like I said before, I really connect with this little film, and appreciate Director Martin Ritt's courage in making it the way he did. I can't guarantee that others will necessarily feel the same way, but I always recommend Cross Creek to friends, be they creatives or not.

Assuming this movie is based on events in the life of the central character, I can only think that she probably was considered too genteel to exist in those surroundings, but apparently she did. I think too, that some, if not all, of the "colorful characters" referred to were real people. Do we want to change these people, and the way they were, just to try and make the characters more compelling than they actually were? If it ain't broke, there's no need to fix it. All of the actors have done an excellent job of bringing their characters to life, particularly Rip Torn. I'm just sorry it's taken me so long to finally see this movie. But, in my opinion, it was certainly worth the wait.

Film fans best know the work of Marjorie Kiniston Rawlings through the adaption of her best known work The Yearling and the later filming of an original story for the screen in The Sun Comes Up. Cross Creek is our opportunity to look inside the mind and character of the woman who was the creator of these classics.

As played beautifully by Mary Steenburgen, we meet Rawlings during the Twenties as a woman with a passion to go to the land and a burning desire to write. She's been submitting potboiler romance novels to publishers who keep telling her to reach for her soul in her writings.

Steenburgen divorces her husband and moves to some Florida swamp land which she by dint of her own hard work and the help of neighbors, she turns into a decent patch for an orange grove. One of them, storekeeper Peter Coyote, evinces more than a neighborly interest.

It's her letters from her town of Cross Creek that excite Steenburgen's potential publisher, Malcolm McDowell, the simple lives and dignity of her neighbors with all their flaws. Especially neighbor Rip Torn and his family, they become the models for the characters in The Yearling.

Cross Creek earned Academy Award nominations for Rip Torn as Best Supporting Actor and Alfre Woodard playing a black woman who Steenburgen takes in and works for her. Cross Creek also got nominations for Best Music Score and Costume Design. Why Mary Steenburgen wasn't nominated for Best Actress is a mystery.

One really ought to see Cross Creek back to back with The Sun Comes Up which was Rawlings original work for the screen and was Jeanette MacDonald's last film. Seeing Cross Creek puts a lot of The Sun Comes Up in context with MacDonald's character and with how Rawlings is interpreted by Steenburgen. Both films will take on a new dimension if anyone has not seen the other.

Cross Creek is one excellent piece of film making about the genesis of a great American writer.

When this movie came out nearly twenty years ago, I was completely aware of it, yet avoided it like the plague. Why? Because it was in the Top Ten lists of most of the noted critics that year, and because of preconceived notions I had about critics and their 'lofty' reviews at the time. I am kicking myself soundly now for having done so.

For those few out there not aware of this remarkable film yet, CREEK is the biographical depiction of a period in the life of renowned author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, when she moved to a very rural area of Florida, became enamored of the place and its people, and was inspired during that time to write some of her best work, including the novel that defined her career, THE YEARLING. Mary Steenburgen's career was just starting to come into its own when she made this film, and her wonderful portrayal of the author as a strong, independent-minded woman at a time when being so was frowned upon is the movie's rock-solid center.

Complementing her are marvelous turns by Peter Coyote as Norton Baskin, the man who becomes extremely interested in Marjorie and becomes a big part of her life; Rip Torn and Dana Hill as Cross Creek natives Marsh and Ellie Turner, the father and daughter who (according to this version of the story) become the inspiration for Rawlings' best-known work, and Alfre Woodard, who was also early in her career, playing Marjorie's somewhat skittish yet steadfast housekeeper, Geechee.

Note must be made of all the actors in the small roles as well, as they all add to the ambiance of this quiet, almost serene backwoods community that Marjorie learned to call home, and where she did much of her best work. A particularly haunting part of the film is when she encounters a young backwoodsman named Tim (John Hammond) and his beautiful pregnant wife (Toni Hudson), who also become the basis of another important Rawlings' story, "Jacob's Ladder", which I am now determined to find.

John Alonzo's photography brings an almost magical feel to the swamp and marshlands of the region, and Leonard Rosenmann contributes a score that accents rather than interrupts the movie's flow.

Plus, there is a bonus in the form of an actor who was also an integral part of Steenburgen's personal life at the time, portraying Max Perkins, Marjorie's publisher. Fans of Mary will already know who I'm talking about, and it is a treat to see them together again after their previous film, TIME AFTER TIME.

I wouldn't call this a 'family' film per se, since the younger ones who might be disturbed by THE YEARLING or OLD YELLER will find this just as disconcerting. But for adults especially, seeking to escape car chases, exploding buildings or the latest adolescent yuk-fest, CROSS CREEK will come as a welcome respite...as soothing and comforting as Ms. Rawlings eventually found it to be.