Hope

HOPE plays out an embarrassingly bad civil rights drama against the backdrop of some truly delightful southern eccentrics led by Christine Lahti as a bible toting and loving but imbalanced woman taking care of her stricken wheelchair bound sister and her sister's strong willed teenage daughter. The daughter, Lily Kate Burns, spends her time begging for dance scholarships that will get her out of town based on delusions about what she had learned from a former rockette who lives nearby. Her partner is a pixyish boy with dyed hair who's Mother gave him the last name of October because she didn't know who the Father was and that was the month he was born.

Both are intelligent kids bored by school and determined to get out of their burned out town. The film takes place during the Cuban missile crisis, with frequent school drills about bomb safety. As Lily notes, the Russians wouldn't think of bombing their town because it looks like it had already been destroyed. When she quizzes Billy about whether or not they are normal, he stares at her in surprise and asks: "Who wants to be normal?" Their teacher, who spends most of her time drunk when she isn't bedding the girl's uncle, tries to gently tell Lilly that she wasn't going to get any scholarship but it doesn't keep the kids from whooping it up or this film from being a lot of fun even with the heavy-handed racial story running in the background. This is a fun movie with a little meat on its bones in the way of interesting characters and situations with a good feel for the environment portrayed.

I actually saw this movie being filmed and got to be an extra in quite a few scenes. The movie was shot in the little town of Anderson, Texas. The town pretty much looks like what you see in the movie, so the movie crews didn't have to do much to the town. A lot of the kids played together in the park down the street from the "Town Hall", which is actually the Grimes County Courthouse. We didn't realize then that we were playing tag and seeing how fast we could spin on the merry-go-round with real Hollywood actors, because they acted just like normal kids.

This movie deals mainly with the segregation issue in the south. It shows how small towns dealt with the issue in their own ways, instead of what you always see in movies about what happened in the big cities. Small towns weren't as open with the de-segregation issue as larger cities were. I convinced my seventh grade teacher to show this in our Texas History class and it had a great effect. (Hint to all the teachers out there... this is a really good movie to use as a teaching tool!) In my mind, this is a MUST SEE MOVIE!!!

The story is made of movies we've seen or we think we saw. Motherless girl in the South (kinda here), has a weird boy for a friend, befriends a black man (sorta), seeks to unveil secret from the past, rides her bicycle, lives with a cooky aunt and strict racist cheating uncle, visits a wacky grownup neighbor, goes up a dusty-and-memory-infested attic, hides in a closet. There are also: Voice Over in the beginning and the end, cop arrests black man for no reason, black kid dies in an avoidable accident, black church gospel.

Set in 1962's fear the Russians will bomb the US, it seems, as too often about TV movies, the movie would have been better with the same characters but different story. The actors do liven up their molded characters. Jane Malone successfully carries the movie on her shoulder, Christine Lahti is -for once- bearable, J.T. Walsh was nominated for an Emmy because he died after filming, Catherine O'Hara, Kevin Jamall Woods and Jeffery D. Sams are wonderful.

So- script could be better, the acting is good, and lovely Goldie does tend to cliche-shots, at the end the camera backs from the church, out the window, trees, sky, credits- this IS mediocre!