Within a Florida Civics Lesson, Rich Stories
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Gazing across an immaculate Florida golf course that used to be a swamp, Murray Silver (Alan King), a multimillionaire developer, conjures the Florida dream of sunshine, orange groves and balmy breezes wafting through palm trees. Wearing the sly, imperious grin of a successful snake-oil peddler and waving his arms like a maestro, he proudly announces to his golfing partners, "We created this nature on a leash." Advertisement
This pungent little scene is a perfect prelude to John Sayles's "Sunshine State," a spacious American epic that examines the world of Delrona Beach, a fictional Florida seacoast town in the throes of development. But as the movie widens its scope, it evokes the ugly flip side of nature on a leash: strip malls, fast-food outlets, environmental destruction, the uprooting of stable communities and the Disneyfication of history. The deeper the movie delves into the forces that threaten to tear apart this nondescript town somewhere south of Jacksonville, the more Delrona Beach looms as a microcosm of not only Florida but also the United States wherever greedy developers stake their claims in the name of progress.
"Sunshine State," which opens today in Manhattan and Los Angeles, may be the most far-reaching civics lesson ever crammed into a 2-hour-21-minute film. But more important, it creates a cinematic mosaic of American lives unprecedented in its range, balance, subtlety and even-handedness. More than a dozen indelible characters are woven into Mr. Sayles's multigenerational, multicultural tapestry. By the end of the film you feel you've not only touched the soul of each one but also tasted some salty essence of our national life. A crucial ingredient of that essence, the movie suggests, is a nagging, unappeasable restlessness that may be the emotional engine driving American capitalism.
Several of the performances in this beautifully written and acted film are small revelations. The closest thing to a central character is Marly Temple (Edie Falco), a sardonic, quick-witted young woman who runs her family business, the Sea-Vue Motel, a slightly shabby but strategically located hostelry that rival developers are itching to purchase and tear down. From her tired Florida twang to her slumped posture to her slightly sour squint, Ms. Falco's Marly is so fully realized that not a drop of her signature role on "The Sopranos" is allowed to leak into her performance. A former mermaid in a local aqua show, Marly is divorced from Steve (Richard Edson), the oafish leader of a defunct rock band named Skeeter Meter (a kind of Lynyrd Skynrd manqué). Steve now ekes out a living impersonating a Union soldier at a local historical attraction and dreams of owning and operating a water slide.
When Marly's younger boyfriend, Scotty (Marc Blucas), announces he's about to leave town to pursue his dream of becoming a golf pro, she falls into an aimless romance with Jack Meadows (Timothy Hutton), a lonely, peripatetic landscape architect who transforms swampland into upscale suburban environments.
The movie is organized around the histories of two families: one white (the Temples), the other black (the Stokeses). Marly's grandly histrionic mother, Delia Temple (Jane Alexander), known as "the Sarah Bernhardt of Delrona Beach," runs the community theater and is a devout environmentalist. Delia's husband, Furman (Ralph Waite), who founded the motel, is a genial, partially blind curmudgeon whose rants about how the world is going to hell attest to his still-vigorous fighting spirit.
The Stokeses are headed by Eunice (Mary Alice), the proud, stiff-backed widow of a revered pillar of Lincoln Beach, a black-owned middle-class enclave that the developers are scheming to obliterate. When Eunice's daughter Desiree (Angela Bassett), exiled in disgrace 25 years earlier, shows up with her husband, Reggie Perry (James McDaniel), an anesthesiologist, the scars of old family wounds are ripped open.
The film's most wrenching encounters are Eunice and Desiree's embittered, walking-on-eggshells dialogues that reveal how the mother's strait-laced morality and obsession with respectability drove her beautiful, rebellious daughter to become pregnant at 15. After being hastened out of town to stay with an aunt in Georgia, Desiree went north and built a career doing infomercials.
The kind of mother-daughter strife that seems so cutely contrived in "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" here feels achingly real. The flashes of resentment, sorrow and lingering affection exchanged by these two great actresses perfectly cast in their roles makes one of the most compelling emotional duels to be seen in a movie in quite a while.
As the story begins, Eunice has taken Terrell Bernard (Alexander Lewis), a 13-year-old distant relative, under her wing. Traumatized by a family tragedy, this listless teenager has tendencies toward vandalism and pyromania, and he latches on to Reggie as a surrogate father.
A third family, the Pickneys, is more sketchily drawn. Earl (Gordon Clapp), a suicidal county commissioner, is battling a gambling addiction that has left him susceptible to bribery. His fussy, high-strung wife, Francine (Mary Steenburgen), runs Buccaneer Days, a bogus local festival that involves a parade, make-believe pirates and a treasure hunt. Francine, who lends the film its brightest notes of comic relief, whines about how hard it is to "invent a tradition" and naïvely refers to her unstable husband as "my rock."
Without forcing the connections, "Sunshine State" has most of its characters cross paths at one time or another, and their remarks constitute an informal community dialogue. If the movie has a moral center, it is Dr. Lloyd (Bill Cobbs), an African-American resident of Eunice's generation who has been around since the civil rights era and who tries with little success to goad the apathetic residents of Lincoln Beach into organizing against the developers.
Dr. Lloyd's idealism is balanced by the pragmatism of Flash Phillips (Tom Wright), a college football legend, also African-American, who has been hired as a front man by a group of developers to buy property under his name. It is Flash who, when confronted with his own duplicity, delivers some of the film's saddest and most resonant lines: "There's a handful of people who run the whole deal, and the rest of us who do what they say and get paid for it."...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/21/movies/21SUNS.html> -- Yoshie
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