Movies into Film
Northfork
Directed by Michael Polish
USA, 2003
Phantoms & Dreams
At its finest, Northfork conjures the kind of feelings you get leafing through old black and white photographs in a junk shop, looking at images of people long gone, as familiar as they are odd and utterly alien. At its worst, the movie reminded me of frat boys who wandered into the English department during my undergrad days, the callow youths who liked literature just enough to sucker susceptible aesthetes. The writer-producer Mark Polish and director Michael Polish (the identical twins whose non-acting graced Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief not so long ago) fuse elements of stark drama and strange fantasy with great skill, then violate the film’s grayish tones with self-conscious smart-ass comedy. The brothers’ cloying hipness isn’t funny, and they don’t know it, so on they push with jokes that more prudent filmmakers might have left as DVD extras. Still, I’ll recommend Northfork because what’s good about the movie makes it worth seeing.
Much of the film’s strength derives from M. David Mullen’s cinematography. The image of Nick Nolte (as a parish priest) reflected in the silver of a whistling, hissing tea kettle suggests that it’s the man who’s about to boil over. And there’s a shot of Padre Nick preaching to his small congregation in a church with no fourth wall—the snow-capped Montana mountain ranges loom behind him as an altar. When first we see the orphan in Nolte’s care, the boy lies looking up from the back seat of a car, and we experience the archaic prairie town with him as it glides by upside down.
There’s a lot of care lavished on anachronistic detail; Northfork nominally takes place in the 1950s yet it feels as if anything from the 1890s onward is fair game. I love the scene of the orphan (Duel Farnes) playing among the dug-up graves of a cemetery and staring so intently at a tombstone that the woman pictured on the marker materializes and becomes his friend. Whether she’s a ghost or an angel, Daryl Hannah makes this role something fun. Hannah underplays here. Sporting a spiky dark hairdo and high ruffled collars, she’s beautifully sexless, and the restraints liberate her to turn in a more nuanced performance than I’ve seen her give before. James Woods isn’t as lucky. He’s required to play his one big emotional scene—where he breaks down and sobs for his late wife—while seated in an outhouse. For all the things they get right, the Polish brothers wreck the movie with latent crudeness; be that as it may, the ruins are magnificent. – NPT
June 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at} moviesintofilm [dot] com