Off the Map

The great thing about "Off the Map" is how beautifully it tells its simple story. It's about a family, mother (Joan Allen), father (Sam Elliott) and daughter named Bo who live completely by their own means, and well off the main road. Having not paid taxes on the little bit of money they make, an IRS agent (Jim True-Frost) comes to find them.

It really is just a character study, primarily about the daughter as she watches the interactions of the adults around her and what she really wants out of life, and about the IRS agent who learns about himself by meeting these people who live their life in a way he never realized.

It's an independent drama driven by a simple narrative and simple shots. The characters aren't all investigated as they probably should have been, and it does move very slowly. But for those who like sitting back and just observing characters, "Off the Map" is well done. I was particularly impressed by Jim True-Frost's performance, and the young Valentina De Angelis as Bo.

This is one of those films you can really lose yourself in. A woman is reminiscing about a time in the early seventies when she was 12 years old and her father was struck down with a bad dose of depression. First thing you notice is the amazing colours of New Mexico, the photography is stunning. Then there's the acting by Joan Allen, Sam Elliott and especially Valentina de Angelis which is sublime. The story is simple but heartbreaking and ocassionally very funny. When the film ends, like waking up after a beautiful dream, you'll long to keep that magical feeling for as long as possible. Not to be missed! (9/10)

When a married Arlene Groden (Joan Allen) tells her house guest, William Gibbs (Jim True-Frost), that although it's nice he's expressed his love for her, it can be accounted for by the power of New Mexico, I knew I would express my love for this understated, eccentric, and satisfying film. While the two male heroes, Gibbs and Arlene's husband, Charley (Sam Neill), are both depressed in the clinical sense, the film is not about depression but rather the forces of devotion and simplicity that keep these retro-hippies functioning in a remote world somewhere around Santa Fe, Taos, and El Paso.

Narrator Bo Groden (as adult, Amy Brenneman and as 12 year old, Valentina de Angelis) reminisces as an adult in voice-over about that 6 months of her father's immobilizing depression in the seventies and her own freedom in that pristine land where she could hunt, plink, and create without restriction. Bo is not a wild child but rather a home-schooled, precociously sensitive pre-teen who plans to leave here as soon as possible while she regularly receives gift packages from manufacturers whom she has threatened to sue over allegedly contaminated products. Her nonchalant but effective treatment of her father in his funks is one of the many acts that assure us she is quite capable of surviving anywhere. Director Campbell Scott's determination not to fill us with back stories on all the characters makes for an energetic exploration of the way they are at this time.

Gibbs, who came from the IRS to audit the family, stays 8 years, long enough to paint New Mexican landscapes of note. His friendship with Charley is true and good, despite that fact that Charley probably knows Gibbs loves Arlene. Charley asks him, "Ever been depressed?" William replies, "I've never not been." Out of his passion for the landscape comes his sanity and a renewed interest in life that he seemed to have lost with the suicide of his mother, for which he feels responsible.

"I am a damn crying machine," Charley says. You may end up crying as well, but only because not enough movies like this are made where insights into humanity are as abundant as the Groden's garden and their four years' supply of homemade canned goods. Lafcadio Hearn could have been describing the Grodens when he said, "It is only in the home-relations that people are true enough to each other, --and show what human nature is, the beauty of it, the divinity of it."

This movie just blew my mind!! Let me start by quoting some of the review in LA Weekly:

From beginning to end, the movie achieves nearly complete originality of expression that makes it as anomalous a figure on today's independent film landscape as the film's characters are on theirs. Sequestered on a ranch deep in the recesses of rural New Mexico, a part-Hopi woman (Joan Allen), her catatonic depressed husband (Sam Elliot) & their precocious 11-year old daughter (Valentina de Angelis) live off the land...

The characters rarely do what we expect of them, while tragedy, absurdity and mordant humor are held in a precarious balance that recalls Sam Shepard at his best...

The ocean meets the sky in a cycloramic mural that, like the movie itself, is a small masterpiece of tone and form. To watch Off the Map is to be pulled into a private universe on the brink of civilization--from which, at the end of two hours, it is impossible to exit unaffected.

This is too true. Half the audience sat through all the credits & then sat for a long few minutes more, just unable to move. For the second time in a week--1st was after Dear Frankie--I was walking the beach for an hour working off feelings stirred up by a film. I don't usually react this way!!

Some more observations from me:

Acting: Joan Allen has GOT to get an Oscar nomination for this! She's excellent throughout, but there's one scene you will never forget: She's hoeing the garden nude with a floppy hat standing like a statue. I won't say more, but what you think is going on isn't. The whole way the scene is filmed is both hilarious & just wow all at once. She was so brave doing that--and no ridiculous implants for her! She's just gorgeous.

Valentina: She shines. It reminded me of the reaction Natalie Portman got in Beautiful Girls. The one where men were saying, "I feel like a pervert, but I can't wait for her to grow up." But this blows Natalie away, in my opinion.

Sam Elliot does an amazing job as the depressed husband. He looks old & grizzled these days but he's got a sexy deep sand papery voice I've always liked. And he's still handsome.

Jim True-Frost plays a visitor who gets drawn into their strange world. He has several excellent scenes where he blurts out all these intense feelings.

Script: The whole story is just so unique. And the dialog is really clever. It will remind you a little of David Mamet.

Directing/camera-work: Campbell Scott created an amazing film and has an eye for beauty and a feel for understated but potent eroticism. But what really got me is the way they framed shots when the characters start doing something really random. The action often starts outside the audience's POV & pans over so you're craning in your seat to see what's going on in anticipation.

I can't recommend this highly enough!

"Off the Map" is an "old-fashioned" film that made me feel, in the immortal words of Frank Zappa, that it's f*cking great to be alive. This film took me to a place in my heart I haven't been since the wonderful Bill Forsyth ("Local Hero") faded from the movie-making scene. It is high time for humane, gentle, wholly original stories of people and places off the map (or in our technological dystopia, perhaps `off the radar screen' would be more appropriate) to fill our movie dreamscape again. New Mexico is the only place in the United States this could have been filmed because, indeed, only the Land of Enchantment could have fit this gorgeous, lyrical story so well.

There wasn't a single relationship in this film that wasn't unique and fully realized. We've seen these set-ups before: the school-girl crush of Bo for William Gibbs, the awe-inspired worship of William for Arlene, the friendship between Charley and George. But don't we always get the caricatures, the popcorn images that point out the woeful arrested development of our country and its mythmakers? We think we want to be young forever. But it takes a film like "Off the Map" to show us all the richness we're missing out on by not growing up. (And the casting and direction of this ensemble of actors was nothing short of genius, especially Joan Allen. It's nice someone can see her as something more than middle-class white bread and pull this very individualistic performance out of her.)

I'm feeling kind of emotional just thinking about some to the great scenes in this film: when Charley runs 20 miles to George's house and goads him into wrestling; when Charley and William talk about what it feels like to be depressed; when William watches Arlene standing naked in her garden watching the totemic coyote; when Bo extracts from George the information she needs to apply for a MasterCharge card; Arlene reading Bo's letter in the newspaper advice column; Bo thanking the squirrel for giving up its life to feed her and her family; George's presence, like an old pair of sneakers, in the Groden home.

Like I said before, I didn't think people made films like this anymore. Thank you, Campbell Scott, for proving me wrong.