Am I My Brother's Keeper?

I must warn that a good deal of postings will concern films. There will be subjects like forgotten films, cult classics, book of the week. I'll engage with the pieces of media I come across randomly. The more I stray away from arts reporting, the more you'll see about flicks on the NMYP.

I'd lump this entry under the forgotten films category.

Today on cable TV I found two not so well reviewed films that pitted brother against brother. In The Hi Lo Country a big King Ranch style ranching operation splits a town in two between authentic cowboys and company men who gave up the cattle drive lifestyle. Big Boy (Woody Harrelson) and his brother LV (Cole Hauser) don't get along when LV takes a job with the big money ranch when Big Boy is off to WWII being a hero.

In Undertow, the third film by the young prodigy Green, who has so far specialized in films about down home people in the South, tells the story of a psycho (Swet Home Alabama's Josh Lucas in a welcome change of tone) comes after his brother Del (Dermot Mulroney) who has taken his own family into hiding in the sticks of Georgia (somewhere near Savannah). The brothers have some issues to settle and things get pretty rough.

Green is obviously exploring new film techniques in Undertow. He freezes frames, uses the spooky score of composer Philip Glass to give the banjo acoustic music an otherworldly quality. He also explores themes from old American literature. When the boy (Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell) flees from his home and takes to the road we are taken on a weird southern odyssey. He meets a black family that feeds him and his brother pot pie, befriends some orphan girls, stealing goods from rickety corner stores along the way.

This part of the plot feels downright Huck Finn. The family head Dermot Mulroney also talks to his boys about a mythical river man of Hades and how he takes the Gold Coins from the dead as price of admittance. Del's father stole these coins and give them to his son. Psycho brother is after these coins, which Del keeps in hiding.

This feels confusing upon first viewing, but I kept in mind that in this film, like all of Green's, people in his universe tell jokes and stories orally. There is no video games or internet. Emphasis is placed on the story and the humans who must interact with each other to tell them. This concern of Green's will lead him toward more literary themes.

In Undertow as in Faulkner the past always comes bubbling up to the surface of the present.

Lastly, I'll comment on a scene at the end of the film. Our Huck Finn meets a pretty orphan girl with a flare for junkyard fashion.

They drain a green bottle of wine together. Most kids would throw the bottle away in the trash or in the woods. But there girl asks him for a piece of paper and a writing instrument. "Writer your wish," she tells him. They both write a wish, place it in a bottle. And the girl throws it in the river. If the bottle reaches the ocean, which can be rare, the wishes will come true.

There is no trash to Green. He uses every resource to put meaning to it. The guys working in the Marina, an abandoned green house, a junkyard tuba. Like Tom Waits and his incorporation of junkyard things into his music productions.

And both of these men have been dubbed "American" artists. Is the only way to become a poet laureate in America to film shots and write verse about junk?

Naw, there's more here. Green deals with stories about family (the ones we are stuck with and the ones we make out of our own experience) told in a natural landscape, with rivers and woods and scraps that more wasteful sorts have discarded-- and only kids have the imagination to put meaning into these things again.

The first film was a modern Western directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen) called Hi Lo Country. This film is worth checking out for Woody Harrelson's (sp.) performance. He eats up the screen as Big Boy, the cowboy who refuses to get any job in the Post WWII economy that doesn't concern the cattle drive "Cowboyin' is fun!." Also there's some great swing country music in it.
Sam Peckinpah wanted to make this film, but he never got around to it. Martin Scorsese put up some cash for it too, I think with Papa Peck in mind.
I think this film is out of print, but if you like bull fighting, Coca Cola in the bottle, Hank Williams and Bob Wills, whiskey drinking poker players, blue skies and a big sounding score it may be for you.

Both of these films are not perfect. The acting isn't always so hot in Hi Lo Country and Undertow is so bleak and you don't see what Green does best (young love) until the third act of the film when two orphans meet and wander about together. And people don't really go to the movies to watch kids dig around in a junkyard (another stopping point in the Undertow odyssey).

But these are ambitious films, and I enjoyed them. The fact that I watched two films with such Biblical themes (Cain and Abel) on the T-V seemed strange and rewarding.