THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL (1985). Director: Peter Masterson.
A lovely, low-key movie and character study about an elderly woman, Carrie Watts (Geraldine Page, who won and deserved an Oscar), who desperately wants to go back to her childhood home for at least one last look. Carrie lives with her son, Ludie (John Heard) and daughter-in-law Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn) in a small home and sometimes there is a definite strain. Based on Horton Foote's play (he also wrote the screenplay), the mood piece is moving because it invokes feelings of lost youth, distant times of (alleged) happiness, past regrets and wasted chances, and all the things that most human beings feel as they grow older. Still, the film primarily works because of Page's superb performance. She makes a woman that many of us would find quite tiresome in real life (what with her hymns and dumb religious assertions) perhaps more interesting than she deserves to be. Still she comes off as a very real person. Heard and Glynn are also quite good. Rebecca De Mornay and Richard Bradford are also notable as a fellow bus passenger and the local sheriff, respectively. One could quibble about certain things, but this is all about mood.
Verdict. Quietly touching. ***.
Has been many years since I saw this, but looks like it is time to again! Page is one of the all time great actors. My two favorite films of the marvelous Ms. Page are in Woody Allen's Interiors as the super-neurotic mother, and in a delightful black comedy by The Aldrich Company costarring Ruth Gordon - Whatever Happened To Aunt Alice. Page is superb in both...
ReplyDelete-Chris
Page has always been one of my favorites -- a splendid actress, who can go from the glamorous and neurotic Alexandro Del Lago in "Sweet Bird of Youth" (I remember her kicking out with her legs at Paul Newman as she talks on the phone) to the dowdy, unsophisticated woman of "Bountiful" and so many things in-between.
ReplyDelete