Concluding their American Heartland trilogy with "Northfork," filmmakers Michael and Mark Polish have created an epic dreamscape, one that's rooted in the dislocations and contradictory spasms that have historically defined American life, but that is populated by subconscious archetypes.
Brooding, funny, stylish, pretentious, profound and often confoundingly hermetic, "Northfork" may remind some viewers of Ethan and Joel Coen at their most deadpan and self-consciously mannered, or of David Lynch on his most surreal day. Their landscape calls to mind the soaring monumentalism of Ansel Adams, their trivial jokes and puns the pop-cultural magpie's nest of Quentin Tarantino. But for all their cinematic and artistic references, the Polishes have managed to create a world all their own in "Northfork," one painfully balanced between the past and the future.
In "Northfork," a priest tends a sickly orphan teetering between reality and dreams of being reunited with a family of angels -- one of whom is played by Daryl Hannah.
(Photos Courtesy Paramount Classics)
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"Northfork" opens in 1955, two days before the fictional eponymous Montana town is to be flooded by a new dam. Most Northfork citizens have fled for higher ground, but a few holdouts remain. It's the job of six black-coated men to visit each recalcitrant home and persuade the occupants to leave; for every five households marked as "departed," the men are given 1.5 acres of waterfront property. Meanwhile, a sickly orphan named Irwin (Duel Farnes) is teetering between his own dire reality and dreams of being reunited with a family of angels (played by Daryl Hannah and Anthony Edwards among others). He's being tended by a mystical priest named Father Harlan (Nick Nolte).
Angels, dreams, loss and rebirth are the cardinal themes of "Northfork," which mostly centers on Irwin's supernatural perambulations as well as the mission of evacuation agents Walter (James Woods) and his son Willis (Mark Polish). While they're trying to persuade one man to abandon the ark he's built (complete with two wives) and getting pep talks from their ruthless boss, they have their own wrenching decision to make: whether to dig up Walter's late wife and move her to another grave, or to consign her to the deep.
Much of "Northfork" unfolds in brief, elliptical encounters in which characters deliver either pompous spiritual pronouncements ("We are all angels. It is what we do with our wings that separates us") or pseudo-deep non sequiturs ("The world is divided into two types of people: Ford people and Chevy people"). Along the way the Polish brothers -- who wrote the script -- aren't shy about trotting out puns or references to such prime-time kitsch as "Diff'rent Strokes" or "Touched by an Angel." Usually such silly humor would serve to ground a movie and make it more accessible; in "Northfork" the effect is to make the experience even weirder and more jarring, as epochs collapse and time itself ceases to make sense.
As maddeningly opaque and self-referential as "Northfork" can be, viewers who stick it out will still be richly rewarded. As usual Michael Polish, who directs the brothers' projects, meticulously frames and composes every shot, to create mini-tableaux of often striking visual power (witness Nolte delivering a mournful sermon in a wall-less church, with the Grand Tetons and a grazing herd of cattle as his backdrop). Cinematographer M. David Mullen, who shot the Polishes' previous two "heartland" pictures, "Twin Falls, Idaho" and "Jackpot," has outdone himself here, photographing "Northfork" in glorious wide-screen format and desaturating the color to create a palette that's altogether appropriate for the story of a town that's literally washed up.
Together the filmmakers have created a strange hymn to desolation and the dusty attempts of men to create life in the midst of disaster. "Northfork" isn't everyone's cup of tea -- as the Polishes admit in a clever bit of critical preemption -- but it possesses an undeniable, haunting grandeur.
Northfork (94 minutes, at the Dupont Circle 5 and Shirlington 7) is rated PG-13 for brief sexuality.
