BEFORE: Wrapping up my weekend in Massachusetts, taking my parents out to dinner tonight. Driving around my old home town is always weird, because there's a new mix of restaurants and stores, very few of the places I used to go to as a teen are still around - the local ice cream store is still there, that hopefully will never go away, but the best restaurants from my childhood memories are all gone. In the same way, my parents' house is filled with a weird mix of things, like toys and games from my childhood, furniture from my grandmother's house, stuff left behind by people who've stayed there over the years, etc. My cousin's living in my old bedroom, so I had to sleep in my sister's old room, but at least the mattress there was very firm, my back appreciated that. But things are just all sort of crazy-backwards there now, it's not like when I was a teenager at all.
Brian D'Arcy James carries over from "Molly's Game" - and he'll be here for four films total, so I think he's kind of like my Caleb Landry Jones for 2019, in that I'd never heard of him before, but once I know who he is, he seems to be everywhere, and I absolutely need to use him as a link to make my chain progress the way I want.
THE PLOT: A simple yet proud farmer in the year 1922 conspires to murder his wife for financial gain, convincing his teenage son to assist - but their actions have unintended consequences.
AFTER: I got a bit excited when I read the plotline for this film, because in its own twisted, horror-based way, it seemed like it would tie in with Father's Day well. In that creepy, Stephen King sort of way, I hoped - and that turned out to be the case. If I'm going to pull off a "perfect year" in 2019, that means I've got to relax my own rules on the genres a little bit - and horror films have spilled out of October somewhat, and then other genres seems to want to spill INTO October - I'm putting one superhero film there (Dark Phoenix) and several animated films, and even one film about golf. Whatever helps maintain the chain and doesn't allow it to be broken.
So, in that same spirit, I'm allowing a bit of the horror genre to overlap or spill into Father's Day. Primarily, this is a film about a man that kills his wife, but he does that with the help of his own son - yes, he uses his influence as a father to turn his son against his own mother, and that maybe gives us an idea about how families were different back in the early part of the 20th century, when men were in the power position, women had fewer rights and had only had the right to vote for a very short time. Divorce was stigmatized, I mean it existed but who wanted that kind of scandal in their history, and courts might be more likely to side with the father where parental rights were concerned, unless that child was still so young that it needed constant care from the mother.
But the plot has to sort bend itself over backwards to create a situation where spousal murder is considered the only option. Of course it wasn't, this couple could have parted ways more amicably, but it's so complicated, and neither side wants to budge. Nebraska farmer Wilfred James owns 80 acres of land where he farms corn, and then his wife Arlette inherits another 100 adjoining acres from her father. He wants to stay and double their output of corn, but she wants to sell both plots and start a new life in the big city, Omaha. Since they can't agree it looks like divorce is imminent, only she wants to take their son with her to the city, and this would both reduce the manpower on the farm AND take him away from his new girlfriend, who lives down the road on the next farm. So while in more modern times other options would be possible - like selling the 100 acres to an interested client to fund her dress shop and then maybe a trial separation, that way if her dress shop failed or she found that she really missed her husband and/or farm life, she could move back.
But in 1922, in this circumstance, to this man, under stress to come up with a hasty solution, murder seemed like the best way out. But that's just the start of the story. How should one hide a body, and make it look like she left under her own power? What's involved in covering up the crime, and what happens when the local sheriff (played by Brian D'Arcy James) comes around making an inquiry? And then, over time, can the father and son move forward, knowing what they've done, and not let any information about their crime slip out? How do you look your father (or son) in the eye when you know, deep down, what he's capable of?
Then there are other unexpected consquences that arise - which might lead one to conclude that hiding a crime is much harder than committing the crime, or that perhaps the family is now cursed, or perhaps that's just a matter of interpretation, and the regular hardships of farm life are amplified by the farmer's guilt, so perhaps his bad luck only seems supernatural. But the latter part of this film plays out sort of like the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Tell-Tale Heart" - hey, if you're going to steal plot points, steal from the best... In that Poe story, a murderer's guilty conscience made him imagine that he could hear his victim's heart beating through the floorboards, which was of course impossible, but a metaphor with that kind of American Gothic gore-based creepy 19th century stuff.
I thought that every Stephen King story was set in the same county in Maine, so it's strange to see one set on a Nebraska farm. But it turns out a farmhouse is pretty creepy during the dark days of winter, especially when a farmer with a guilty conscience is troubled by images of his dead wife. Maybe it's a side effect of that infected bite he got from a rat, who's to say? But the rats were pretty creepy, too.
This is the second Stephen King-based film I've watched this year, the first was "Gerald's Game". I was planning on getting to a third when "It: Chapter Two" comes out, but now I think that's one of the films I'll need to drop this year, in order to make the count come out right. Come to think of it, I need to put off "The Dark Tower" this year also - I could have linked to it via Idris Elba right after "Molly's Game", but I couldn't see a way back to my planned chain from there. So two this year, then maybe two more next year.
Also starring Thomas Jane (last seen in "Drew: The Man Behind the Poster"), Molly Parker (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Dylan Schmid, Kaitlyn Bernard, Neal McDonough (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Tanya Champoux, Bob Frazer, Eric Keenleyside (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Patrick Keating.
RATING: 5 out of 10 dresses left behind in the closet
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