Spring \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Bee Hiving Moon<\/p>\n
Kate and I saw Nebraska the other night. \u00a0This movie was pitch perfect for heartland small town dialogue. \u00a0The images it created of Billings, Montana,\u00a0Hawthorne, Nebraska, \u00a0and Lincoln, Nebraska felt taken from my recent adventure driving between my surprise incursion point into Kansas and Highway 80 in mid-Nebraska. \u00a0Small rural towns in the midwest have suffered, a lot, over the last 50 years. \u00a0They’re run down and often sparsely settled though that trend has begun to ameliorate somewhat.<\/p>\n
There were as well images of striking beauty, especially a wide-angle shot of a slightly rolling field with bales of rolled hay sprinkled throughout. \u00a0If not for the black and white, it could have been painted by Breughel. \u00a0The big sky and vast horizons of the drive from Billings to Lincoln are also beautiful, the stark aesthetic of the plains.<\/p>\n
Not only because it was black and white, but because of its tight focus on family and strangeness (remember Mom lifting her skirt to the gravestone?), too, this film reminded me of Ingmar Bergman. \u00a0These were everyman characters dealing with everyday issues: \u00a0a desultory \u00a0job, American hucksterism and its unwitting victims, a long distanced father and son closing the gap, a slow revelation of Woody and David’s largeheartedness.<\/p>\n
It will, unfortunately, only serve to convince bi-coastal sophisticates that the rural midwest is unredeemable, shabby and coarse, low-browed. \u00a0It cannot and does not try to show the agricultural culture that lies behind the small towns and cities and lives it portrays. \u00a0It also cannot show the slow but persistent erosion of rural life as farming has gone corporate and the kids leave home for Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, even Lincoln and Omaha.<\/p>\n
This is not a criticism of the movie, but a wistful longing for an artful representation of growing food, tending livestock, some way of showing the heartland as just that, the heart of a great nation and a food producer for the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spring \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Bee Hiving Moon Kate and I saw Nebraska the other night. \u00a0This movie was pitch perfect for heartland small town … Continue reading Wish I’d Known the Son-of-a-Bitch Wanted to be a Millionaire.<\/span>