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In Northfork, even the heavenly host gets soggy
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
Whatever happened to "art" films?
You know what I'm talking about—those slow, cryptic, elliptical things with sad-eyed European women and brooding symbolism and the occasional bare breast so some reviewer can call it "erotic," guaranteeing a date-night audience of philosophy majors.
These days, an "art" film is more likely to be an insane Hong Kong bloodbath or an ironic French porno than some expressionistic contemplation of death and love. Even philosophy majors want some bang for their buck. I'm not saying this by way of bereavement—I'm fine with the bloodbaths and pornos. I suppose that's why David Lynch is my favorite working director—he makes expressionistic contemplations of death and love with bloodbaths and pornography included.
I'm guessing that Mark and Michael Polish like David Lynch too. The twin filmmakers from Idaho have a visual style that owes a lot to Lynch's American surrealism, Edward Hopper by way of Luis Bunuel. It's also natural and fair up to a point to compare the Polishes to the Coen Brothers, another pair of Midwestern siblings. Like the Coens, the Polishes (Mark does most of the writing, Michael directs) are probably doomed to live with the word "quirky" in a lot of reviews and profiles.
But as their third film Northfork makes clear, the Polishes have their own sensibility and perspective, and it really doesn't have more than a surface resemblance to either Lynch or the Coens. The Polishes are more earnest and more obvious and more self-consciously serious. They are, in fact, old-fashioned "art film" guys. They want to say important things. The only problem is that I'm not sure they've figured out which important things they want to say.
Northfork is the third in a trilogy of films about the modern American West. The first (and best) was Twin Falls, Idaho, in which the Polishes starred as Siamese twins who fall in love with the same woman. The second was Jackpot, named after and partly set in a gambling town on the Idaho/Nevada border; it's about a deluded karaoke singer aiming for the big time, and his equally deluded manager. Northfork is named after a Montana town that, in the movie at least, is scheduled to be drowned by a new dam in 1955.
The movie takes place over the two days before the waters are due to start rising. There are two primary storylines: A frontier preacher (Nick Nolte, doing a Kris Kristofferson imitation) watches over a dying orphan in a church that has been abandoned as the congregants seek higher ground; and a father and son (James Woods and Mark Polish) working on behalf of the federal government visit local houses to make sure all the residents have evacuated.
There's a third strand too, which eventually brings the other two together, and it represents both the movie's ambitions and its follies. A mysterious quartet is holed up in a house in the flood zone, and they're also looking for someone to evacuate: an "unknown angel." It turns out that the Montana plains used to be home to flocks of wild angels, who were hunted to near extinction. The oddball foursome—a tea-guzzling dandy in a turban (Robin Sachs), a maternal Goth chick with a wig safety-pinned to her scalp (Daryl Hannah), a mute cowboy with a music box (Ben Foster), and a mad scientist with amputated arms (a post-doc Anthony Edwards, still searching for life after ER)—is clearly not of this mortal coil. And if you're thinking that a dying orphan in an abandoned church is a good bet for a lost angel, then you have some idea of the sentimentalism at work here.
The central subject here is death (I told you it was an art film). The opening scene shows a coffin bobbing on the waves of a lake, and the gray looming dam is referred to as a tombstone no less than twice. But it's never really clear what the Polishes are getting at, beyond a general sense that it's sad when things die. If the extinct angels are supposed to represent the lost innocence of the American prairie, then it's the most hamhanded metaphor of the year.
What's good about the movie is its sense of place, especially its magnificent widescreen Montana landscapes. The Polishes love the sweep and light and unfinished cragginess of the Plains and Rockies, and you can feel in their movies how much those places shaped them. The region deserves its own brand of lyricism, and it's commendable for the Polishes to try to fit the bill. If they ever manage to join their landscapes to a story that can comfortably inhabit them (the way, say, Terrence Malick did for the Great Plains in Badlands), they'll make a great film.
As it is, Northfork falls into that tiresome category of movies too interesting to dismiss but too flawed to actually enjoy. It doesn't help that the Polishes don't have much of a sense of humor. The film is so po-faced that the occasional gags would feel out of place even if they were funny, which they mostly are not. Oh, and philosophy majors should note—there's not a bare breast in sight.
August 21, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 34
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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