Travel Back in Time to a Story You Already Know
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“Sweet Land,” opening today at Cinema Village, concludes with a scroll of contact information for Amnesty International and various other worthy organizations with missions that are, as far as I could tell, totally unrelated to the film’s content. Like everything else in the picture, this coda is emblematic of the seemingly inexhaustible good intentions the filmmakers brought to their project. It’s also a fitting finish for a movie that works hard to make a fresh and truthful point about America’s present via its past, but almost completely fails to make clear what that point is.
“Sweet Land” begins with a three-tiered flashback through the history of southern Minnesota that starts in 2004 and pauses in the late 1960s before settling in the early 1920s for the bulk of the film. It’s one of those narrative tropes that old studio movies managed effortlessly. Unfortunately, in independent writer-director-producer Ali Selim’s hands, this skipping story stone sinks by the second bounce.Though the majority of the film is a twice-told personal reminiscence passed from grandmother to grandson,”Sweet Land” almost entirely lacks a specific, vivid point of view or individual, sentimental coloring.
Once settled in the 1920s, the film chronicles the Midwestern arrival of young Inge Altenberg (Elizabeth Reaser),sent from Europe to fulfill a sight-unseen marriage arrangement to a young Norwegian immigrant named Olaf Torvik (Tim Guinee).But in their haste to pair the couple off, Olaf and Inge’s go-betweens neglected to mention that Inge is in fact German, not Norwegian. Having adopted America’s post-World War I anti-German prejudice, the insular Norwegian-American community to which Olaf belongs pressures him to abandon the wedding. As it turns out, the heartsick young man couldn’t tie the knot even if he wanted to — Inge’s immigration documents have gone missing.
With marriage indefinitely postponed, Inge goes to stay with Federsen (Alan Cumming) and his wife, Brownie (Alex Kingston), a broadminded young farm couple willing to risk ostracism for harboring Inge. Federsen and Brownie have the family part of “family farming” down, but that farming part, as in making a profit and paying off debts, is another matter.
What follows is a poker hand of social issues — immigrant prejudice, small-farm reform, burgeoning feminism, socialism, and changing sexual mores — uncomfortably played by clichéd characters in situations that were threadbare in D.W. Griffith’s day. A bank president threatens foreclosure, a fire and brimstone minister meddles in the personal lives of his flock, a proudly headstrong woman refuses to bend to hypocrisy, an equally proud and virginal young man is forced to agonize about his love for three reels, etc. etc.
This uneasy blend of the familiar with the even more familiar perfectly illustrates a certain tendency among contemporary filmmakers to build historical dramas around lead characters who embody contemporary sensibilities. Though gamely played by Ms. Reaser, Inge — a bilingual, free-love advocating German socialist who is apparently blissfully unaware that her native country and adopted country were ever at war — is as out of place in the steam powered peat and permafrost Minnesota of “Sweet Land” as the Enterprise crew was on that planet of roaring 1920s Chicago gangsters in the old “Star Trek” series.
Drama hasn’t changed much in 1,000 years because frankly, human nature hasn’t changed much during that time. “Sweet Land” offers no insight or connection to any authentically elemental human needs driving Inge and company, instead preferring to herd all assembled through a round-up of contrived conflicts until arriving at the end of the trail, where justice is served via an arbitrary change of heart. The 1920s milieu the film strives to re-create lacks anything but the most perfunctory melodramatic unity.Though based on a real place and shot in a real place, it all feels fake. There’s literally no then there.
On the plus side,”Sweet Land” boasts a strong cast.But Ms. Reaser, Mr. Guinee, Actors Studio and Steppenwolf alumna Lois Smith, excellent journeyman screen and stage actor John Heard, Ned Beatty, 1970s MTM vet Paul Sand, Mr. Cumming (who resorts to the song and dance approach to bring his character to life), and the rest are left stranded by a screenplay in which go-nowhere scenes pile up like hay bales.Though filled to the brim with confrontations and stand-offs, “Sweet Land”is hobbled by the kind of inept storytelling and lazy, condescendingly patchwork characterizations that have helped push Sundance-era American Independent Cinema to the margins of relevance, right alongside the supposedly corrupt, marketplace-driven mainstream Hollywood films that films like this one are presumably meant to supplant.
If the mysterious form of mass hallucination known as the film festival audience award ever goes on trial, “Sweet Land” should be exhibit A for the prosecution.Why year after year festival audiences feel compelled to single out misshapen self-congratulatory boutique misfires like this film (it won “Best Narrative Feature” by viewer consensus at the 2005 Hamptons Film Festival), remains one of show-business’s most puzzling enigmas.
“Sweet Land’s” dawn and dusk lit historical re-creation of a pre-war Midwestern agrarian community has generated comparisons to Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven.” But with its one-dimensional characters, on-the-nose dialogue, and squandered cast, it more closely resembles a small-scale version of Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate.”