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Local HeroRating:
Release Date: 21 September, 1999 Retail Price: $9.97 OUR Price: $9.97 You SAVE: $0.00! Cast: Complete Cast (7 total) |
Local Hero Reviews
A Heroic film experience - french new wave meets burges
Today's newest filmaking savant is Wes Anderson who pays an awful lot of homage to the French New Wave and 1970's American film wave that brought you Harold and Maude. I've often wondered if or why 'Local Hero' is never mentioned in his list of formative film experiences.
This gentle, wistful, whimsical comedy is never anything but subdued and perfect-pitch. Comedies today have become so broad (zoolander) or over the top (something about mary) or stylized (coen brothers) that a more restrained eye I fear suffers. The aforementioned all please and are a cut above the rest, but what makes 'Local Hero' so different and beguiling is how it builds slowly not resorting to contrivances to do so. This picture, site and sound, feels organic.
In life it usually follows that the reward is always in the journey; something that is usually only evident in hindsight. And so it goes with LOCAL HERO. The story follows a Texas oil executive, Mac (the always great Peter Reigert at his best) who is sent by his irreverent, eccentric-bordering-on-sociopathic Boss, Mr. Happer (Burt Lancaster), to a Scottish coast town to purchase the land to locate an oil refinery on the basis that he's Scottish. The irony is that Mac is not actually Scottish (his last name assumed when his parents entered the country) and a product of assimilation and rootlessness in his sense of community.
Upon arriving, the town slowly slips under his skin and he begins a slow transformation. The land is something untouched by the modern world, almost primal in its beauty. The people, hard working and eccentric. The catch is that they have their own plan: a poker game, as the head negotiator (Ewan Macgregor's uncle) puts it, to become "bloody stinking rich" off of the Yanks through the sale of their town and surrounding land.
As both sides play out their hands, fate steps in, with Mac, almost in the middle, caught up in trying to do his job and secretly longing to stay (There's a really poignant scene where he pitches switching lives with the local Accountant/Inn Keeper).
Ultimately, the movie helps remind us of how we quickly forget very simple pleasures. The dialogue is smart, terrific really, it's message sweet and sad and the interactions quirky without feeling forced. This is the independent cinema should be.
An ode to authenticity
Local Hero is appealing on many levels. There is, of course, the wondeful quirky story and characters, the music, the off-kilter British humor, and the magnificent scenery.
But I think that the reason I love this movie, and to me the real beauty of the film is watching what happens to Riegert. His Macintyre, a young, efficient corporate executive, is a man fully immersed in his time, his place, and his role. The time is the 1980s-the greed decade, some have billed it. The place is Knox Oil, Houston. His role at the firm and in his life is that of a hard boiled deal maker. And at the end of the day, he returns home to his luxury high rise, where he lives alone with his answering machine. Macintyre lives a life that's less than genuine, and on the deepest level, he knows it.
But in Furness, we can see Macintyre's hard shell crack -- the result of his spending time in this authentic place-the power of Furness' pounding surf almost literally wears away his layers. When his walls are broken what's revealed for all of us to see, then, is nothing less than his true self. We can see it, for instance, in Macintyre's eyes as he laughs with Gordon, the Inn's proprietare over a drink during the high-stepping Scottish dance, and we can even see it in his hands when he empties his pockets of the sandy shells he's collected.
I think that like Mac, most of us have forgotten or buried some part of our authentic selves, and that part of us quietly lays dormant. It might be buried from trying to mold ourselves to fit into some stultifying corporation, as with Macintyre. Or it could be from trying to live some other kind of unsatisfying life that's not in synch with who we really are. So, I think we can all hope that something like what happens to Mac will happen to us, or--be grateful that it already has. Mac's journey evokes T.S. Elliot's words:
"We shall not cease from exploration. And at the end of all of our exploring, will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time."
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