Der letzte Outlaw

A friend borrowed this DVD from a library in farming country Saskatchewan. Now, I was raised on a farm in Southern Ontario, lost to the same Farm Creditor shenanigans portrayed in this movie, so I have great sympathy for the story line. BUT, if these two idiots drank as much as is portrayed throughout this movie, when they should have been working the farm, then no wonder they lost it.

But after too many minutes of gnawing my knuckles, hoping that the hokey acting would end, I know why I never heard of this movie Miles From Home before…. And I hope I never hear of it again…

Okay, this movie killed time but I nearly died watching it… (I am certain some rich movie reviewer has already copyrighted that line)...

God, I hope your evening was more entertaining… take me out and shoot me… a bunch of drunk farmers burning down farms because of Farm Creditors…? Could have been a good movie,should have been a good movie because it did start out right... burning a farm down because some fat creditor might get it? Every citizen who wants justice in our real lives sure could use this premise in real life... but… hooo boy…

Probably got its 5.7 out of 10 rating from the drunken cowboy-farmer population who would buy this thing and then donate ten to the local library and give it a 9 because they could get the sympathy vote after blowing their tellie apart when the evil bank manager shows up on screen???

Gere as a cowboy? Just did not work! Maybe it was the Buddhist Angst just starting to build in him. And Helen Hunt appearing on screen for five minutes to suck tongue with Gere… Gee whiz, the earlier session with Gere in a trailer bedroom doing a trailer lady who was once a farmer and lost her farm for the same reasons? Sexual titillation for minutes and minutes (audio only, damn!) made Hunt's part with Gere totally ludicrous and irrelevant to the theme of the movie…

Wheehaaaa, ride her cowboy! I was sayin'… I mean, with the actress who appeared earlier in the movie and seemed to be one of the rare persons in this film who knew what the term 'acting' meant… hard to say why Hunt was even in the movie, except maybe as a crowd draw via the billboard titles at the theatres… No droolin', only dumb drawlin' in this thing…

These actors obviously NEVER had to deal with the realities of this stuff farmers do face or they would have applied some real emotion to their acting situations...

For the moments that Gere did swing a gun around on screen, I was hoping it would turn into a real one, swing my way and put me out of my misery. Happened more than a couple of places in this movie...

Oh, watch it for some of the scenery and for that moaning and shrieking scene near the start but DO NOT go out and buy this movie, unless you are one of those kinda people who collects everything about Robert, oooopppps, Richard Gere.... seeeeee. Just proving how fast I wanted to forget who acted in this thing...

The first movie I have ever rated below 5 because I try to see the good in every movie.... hmmmmm, so why did I give it 3??? Oh, yeah! For the trailer park sex segment that should prove to guys that anything over three minutes might actually interest a real woman... So, it does have some sex education merit, I suppose...

I felt the story started rambling after the farm fire with no real cohesive storyline. Richard Gere tried too hard and over-acted. Maverick, lone gun, come to mind. Save the farm for these jokers? I think not!

Saddled with the foreclosure of their ailing Iowa farm, two brothers do the logical thing and burn it to the ground, embarking on an idyllic crime spree through Middle America and becoming folk heroes, which if nothing else seems to be a great way to meet sexy women. The script makes a brave attempt to dramatize the plight of farmers facing tough times, but unlike the drought-stricken heartland it suffers from an overabundance of corn. For a while the film wavers between being passable entertainment and an embarrassing, beer commercial ode to amber waves of grain, but whenever it threatens to become halfway interesting something obvious invariably happens: a lonely widow becomes available or a cop car comes into view, and so forth. Richard Gere downplays his matinée idol glamour, but not enough to disguise his resemblance to an American Gigolo playing Old MacDonald. And featured in the flashback introduction is (of course) Nikita Khrushchev; it figures that somewhere behind all the economic chaos of the Corn Belt the Commies had to be at fault.

There was a Midwestern farm crisis from 1984 to 1987 or so, and Nikita Kruschev did come to Iowa to the Garst farm at Coon Rapids as I recall. There are some good things about this movie, but I think the bad things outweigh them. It is one of the few movies about modern agriculture. The incident at the trailer house makes Gere's character look like a real loser. The incident with the ox pull makes you wonder if there was cruelty to an animal. You don't usually see an armed guard at a bank in Iowa. Maybe the writer watched too many Andy Griffith shows. I've never seen a grain truck back into an elevator and I've never seen a combine unloading corn into a truck on the go in real life. All in all, I can't help but think that someone in the state of Iowa could have written a better movie.

That's the metaphor that explains this story. Two guys started a protest, but liked their outlaw status, and didn't know when to quit.

"Miles From Home" takes a look at the life of the small-time farmer, guys who's farms were once-prosperous thirty and forty years ago, but with the price of upkeep going up faster than the price of agriculture, many have lost their farms (and homes) to corporate farm owners.

Richard Gere and Kevin Anderson are the Roberts brothers. Their father's farm is one of historical significance. As we see in the introduction, Nikita Krushcev visited the farm, which might seem unusual that a Russian leader would travel all the way to some small farm in the states. Especially given the time period, it's a wonder they didn't label Frank Roberts, Sr. (Brian Dennehy) a Communist and try to shut him down. But, apparently, Kruschev came because he admired his father's farm, voted best farm in the state that year.

It's been some time since their father died, and the sons took over the farm. Gere is the oldest boy, "Frank"; Anderson is "Terry". They have had a bad year on their farm and have yet to pay off an undisclosed number of mortgages and loans. So, the fellow from the bank comes buy to inform the brothers that they had been offered a pretty good deal for the farm, and they've agreed to sell it. Frank in particular, finds immense defeat in having the banks take over the property--the banks being a disdainful institution when you're a small town farmer in that area (we see Judith Ivey's character is the wife of a farmer who was foreclosed upon). So, Frank and Terry get the idea to burn the farm and the house down.

In that town, their arsonist protest makes them local heroes. Like I said, people don't like the lending institutions because so many have risked foreclosure. But, now the cops are after Frank and Terry because they burned the property that the bank owned, and now are risking criminal sanctions, if nothing else.

Frank and Terry take advantage of the situation, though Terry is a little more reluctant than Frank to start playing outlaw. They may have been famous at one point, even agreeing to be interviewed (by a journalist played by John Malckovich), but pretty soon--things get out hand. Frank wants to rob banks and shoot the bank representative who wanted to sell their farm. But Terry doesn't want to get involved in that any further. In fact, though fugitives, they just want to go to work on a farm again. But, they can't exactly return to the life they know. The locals were kind enough to help them get as far as they did, and it's up to Terry and Frank to decide what they'll do from there.

It's like Terry's childhood memory of himself running through the cornfields at night for so long and having so much fun before he realized he didn't know how to get back.

It's a pretty good movie, and one that is Gary Sinise's directorial debut of a feature film (he had previous director credits on three television series). Gere does do a little overacting towards the end and the movie does drag along a bit at certain points, but overall, it was a pretty good movie that makes a significant point about small farmers who are running out of options.