The Basket

The Basket is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. It was not only beautifully filmed, but the story was as deep as you looked. It didn't need fancy special effects or thrills - just solid film making at it's best.

I actually stumbled on this film. My wife and I heard about this movie via word of mouth that it was a must see. Two weeks later by some stroke of luck it was playing at our local theater. When the movie ended I couldn't help to think what happened with the distribution of this movie. It deserves much more screen time and exposure than it has received. If I hadn't heard about this movie from a friend, I may never have seen it. It was Fantastic!

This sleeper deserves to be seen, I enjoyed it as much as "Life is Beautiful" that got so much aclaim.

My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed this film and strongly recommend it.

Many folks have praised the historical accuracy of this film. I question the whole factual basis of the film, did 1. Americans kill civilians in Germany, and 2. Was there sufficient time and reason for German orphans to have been brought to America before the War's end?

America didn't enter the War 'til 1917, and, from my reading, the Allies did not even penetrate Germany before Armistice in November 1918

For me, this film grates on many levels. One of those is the repetitive Wagnerian musical score and fictional German opera. Could such a choice of an opera comport with a teacher's, never mind community, sensibilities of the time?

Was the farmer's supposedly outmoded harvester so advanced in that day as to be beyond the skills of the American farmer nor his grown sons?

And while facing an American flag, to which flag was the young German pledging allegiance?

This film can be compared to the far more polished 'Snow Falling on Cedars'.

This was a video store closeout, and a remarkable find. The best part first. Having had relatives and in-laws who lived there in the time, this looks and feels real. The horse drawn harvester, to start with. The blue sky and tufts of clouds, the golden hills and pines - not fake at all - it's the northern Palouse in early fall. The attitudes of the people are just what I'd expect. Suspicious of anything new or foreign - Spokane was the IWW headquarters just prior to this period, and dangerous radicals such as Joe Hill(strom) wandered all through the basin making trouble for the established citizenry. WWI had a huge effect on Northwest labor history, and the tension between loyalty and freethinking was strong. Yet there was also the great thirst for culture, and a pre-mass media naivete, in these places - a yearning for art perhaps inspired by living in the midst of great beauty. Finally, all those stark white houses, churches and schoolhouse sitting forlornly out in the wide open. The movie gets ALL of this right.

Sadly, there isn't much of a story to complement the pictures. The problem with small town life is that it was boring, and it's hard to find a believable story with a lot of drama that fits. Focused on the relationships only, this might have been something like A River Runs Through It or Napoleon Dynamite (both of which play against similar scenic backdrops). Focused on the sports story, perhaps Hoosiers. Focused on outsiders fitting in, perhaps Days of Heaven. But muddled all together, it comes out like a string of TV episodes, like Little House on the Prairie. Very melodramatic, with all the music swells and dramatic incidents that usually precede a commercial.

The Basket is well worth your time. The story is well told, the scenery is beautiful, the music is haunting, and the characters believable. We went to see it because it was filmed nearby and we wanted to see if we could recognize the landscape and buildings. We went back a second time because we wanted to show a visitor from Russia a well made American movie (without fear of embarrassment over language or content). Irena may not have understood all the dialog, but she sure understood the story and the message. The Basket far surpasses our parochial interest.

For a nation founded on high ideals of freedom and equality, we have often failed to practice what we preach, certainly in our relations with American Indians and black slaves and their descendants. Less well known are the feelings of distrust and even hatred we felt toward those who had a common ancestry to our bitter enemies in war, the Japanese of World War II and the Germanic people of World War I. Watching the screening of this film in my own Lidgerwood Presbyterian Church last week, I was reminded of how my maternal great-grandfather Jacob Eilmes, an immigrant from Austria, pretended to being Polish during WWI to escape the wrath of his Spokane neighbors. Set in a time and place of the U.S. and shot on location,ironically, not far from which a great many communities existed in real life, including in southern Lincoln County, Washington, where my own father's family lived after leaving Europe, "The Basket" weaves a story of a town disrupted by the simultaneous appearance of two orphans and an opera from Germany. Perhaps for dramatic effect, by the way, the story takes some literary license with historic facts. The flashbacks shown of American soldiers killing civilians in Germany could never have happened during the war because our ground troops never got out of France in that time. The orphans and opera have a huge impact on the whole town, accomplished primarily by the introduction of a game called basketball. Today in eastern Washington, especially the small farming communities like the one in this story, high school basketball is still the linchpin that brings townsfolk together, so this movie may be preaching to the choir to those of us who live in the same area depicted in this film. But even if you live in an area outside basketball-mad places like eastern Washington or the state of Indiana, you should enjoy this fine story, which won the 2001 Movie Guide Award for "best film for families." (These awards are also known as the Christian Oscars.) I stop far short of calling this the greatest movie ever made about intolerance rearing its ugly head in a small town, but it's still well worth the effort of buying the DVD or going to see it when it's next shown at your neighborhood library, church or other venue. Dale Roloff