luannjim

...I say, if you have read the book, this movie is a stinker of massive proportions; few great novels have ever been so horribly mangled by clueless Hollywood hacks.

And make no mistake, Ross Lockridge Jr.'s RAINTREE COUNTY is one of the greatest novels you never heard of. Over 1,000 pages long, it takes place on a single day, July 4, 1892, in the life of John Wickliff Shawnessy, age 53, a small-town Indiana schoolteacher haunted by memories of two courtships and marriages, family secrets, lost love, and traumatic service in the Civil War. In the course of the holiday, these memories bubble up randomly from Mr. Shawnessy's subconscious, a series of aching, bittersweet and tragic reminders of what was - and what might have been. The effect is of a jumbled, time-hopping mosaic of the life of a decent, ordinary boy and man buffeted by decades of events great and small.

This sprawling, complex novel would have tested, and might well have defeated, the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. It didn't stand a chance with director Edward Dmytryk and writer/producer Millard. Kaufman, two fifth-rate talents with not a great movie between them, and the smattering of decent movies on their resumes (MURDER MY SWEET, CROSSFIRE, THE CAINE MUTINY, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK) were that good in spite of them. Writer Kaufman took one look at Lockridge's novel, threw up his hands, and just decided to make something up - and what he came up with was junk. Director Dmytryk actually boasted - boasted! - that he didn't even try to read the book.

Montgomery Clift's horrific, near-fatal auto accident midway through filming, tragic as it was, is beside the point; he was miscast from the get-go. The part called for a Henry Fonda circa 1935; by 1957, who knows? Maybe Earl Holliman or (in a pinch) Dennis Hopper. Elizabeth Taylor, Oscar nomination notwithstanding, is just auditioning for Scarlett in a road-company GONE WITH THE WIND. Only Eva Marie Saint as Nell Gaither really matches the novel - but Kaufman so wrecks Nell's tragic character arc that it doesn't matter.

Read the book instead. It'll blow you away. Then, if you must, watch the movie for a sample of what gives Hollywood a bad name.

In July of 1977 I was sitting in my parents' family room with my father while FLAMING STAR played on TV. At one point my dad turned to me and said, "Now there's a guy, one of these days, he's gonna get tired of (fooling) around, the right part's gonna come along, and he'll win an Academy Award." I said, "Yeah, I think you're right."

Alas, we were wrong; a month later Elvis was dead. But we still have FLAMING STAR. It may well be Elvis's best movie, and it's certainly his best performance; in 1960, and even in 1977 (to those of us who didn't know how Elvis's life was nosediving) that Oscar didn't look that far off. FLAMING STAR gives a glimpse of the actor we might have had. I blame Col. Parker that we didn't - but that's a debate for another day.

It's been ten years since this "documentary" came out and Nanette Burstein still hasn't fessed up (the way Peter Jackson did, and immediately, with FORGOTTEN SILVER), so we can now call it what it is. It's not a documentary, nor is it (as one reviewer here suggests) a "mockumentary". It's a hoax, and a pretty clumsy one at that. Burstein supposedly studied a group of high school seniors in small-town Indiana, only to discver that -- surprise! -- they're as stereotypical as characters in a John Hughes movie or an episode of THE O.C. or DAWSON'S CREEK. There's the sensitive rebel (Hannah Bailey), the jock (Colin Clemens), the band geek (Jake Tusing) and the snooty campus queen (Megan Krizmanich). Now granted, they may be real teenagers, and their stories may be (more or less) true, but the movie is a virtual symphony of false notes. Tusing's acne seems to clear and re-erupt from one hour to the next. Many scenes (and I frankly think all of them) are patently staged, with visible microphone packs and camera crews on both ends of "spontaneous" phone calls. Tusing downs his first shot of what we are told is tequila, but he doesn't so much as grimace (even seasoned drinkers can't do that without making a face, never mind a tequila "virgin"). Home video dated 1988 shows Clemens a year old, yet he's supposedly 17 in 2006. And Burstein takes a writer's credit, but there's no narration -- so obviously, what she wrote is the "spontaneous" dialogue.

The movie is entertaining in its hackneyed way, but so trite and cliche-ridden that the only way Nanette Burstein could hope to get away with it was to claim that it was "real life" that just HAPPENED to be trite and cliche-ridden. That so many people -- not only reviewers here but the jury at Sundance and supposedly sophisticated film critics -- accepted this obvious fiction as an honest documentary speaks volumes about their own gullibility.