Horn of Plenty

The Trip to Bountiful

Directed by Peter Masterson

At the Nickelodeon and Harvard Square

Theatre

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR television, The Trip to Bountiful survived three decades of artistic limbo before making it to the silver screen. Its troubled odyssey explains both why the film is so resolute, and why its scope is so limited. Visually splendid, The Trip to Bountiful is inspiring despite its stark, biting realism. But there is frustratingly little plot development: never is the movie threatening, and rarely is it even surprising. As an audience, we are awed, but not challenged.

Bountiful succeeds primarily as a painstaking character portrayal that is unusually perceptive and occasionally brilliant. Geraldine Page is wonderful as Mother Watts, the doting, doddering old protagonist, a hymn-singing, sentimental Jewish mother who happens to be a Texas Christian. She lives in a cramped Houston apartment with her milquetoast son Ludie (John Heard) and shrill daughter-in-law (Carlin Glynn), leading a weary existence that only aggravates her deteriorating heart condition.

Before she dies, Page yearns to visit her childhood home, a barren and deserted Gulf Coast town called Bountiful. She hides her pension check to garner the necessary funds and packs hastily in a desperate attempt to visit Bountiful, but her son and daughter-in-law are bent on preventing her escape.

Finally, of course, despite some predictable obstacles, Page returns to Bountiful. She, Ludie, and a helpful sheriff (Richard Bradford) ruminate on the meaning of life in this deserted town. Then Page must return to Houston. That's all there is.

Despite the paucity of plot, Page has a lock on an Academy Award nomination for this film. She can express more with the contours of her face than most actresses can express with their entire bodies. We come to understand her less by what she says than by how she twists her face when she pouts, or by how she hums when she rocks in her favorite chair and pulls a blanket snugly around her shoulders, staring at the full moon and dreaming.

Heard is nearly as good as the wimpy son who begins to realize that he is a loser in life because he cannot dream. His mannerisms are strikingly similar to those of Dustin Hoffman, coming off like a Houston version of Willy Loman from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. His portrayal of Ludie is both convincing and subtle.

THE OTHER CHARACTERS fall just a little short. As the daughter-in-law, Glynn is trapped in a one-dimensional role, handicapped by the shallowness of the script. We are constantly alerted to the fact that she is a heartless, tacky bitch, but the character is so overwrought that, despite some hints of depth, we never see enough complexity really to identify with her. Ditto for Thelma (Rebecca De Mornay), a young woman whom Page befriends in a bus station on the way to Bountiful. De Mornay's character is so unflinchingly sweet that when she suddenly and inexplicably disappears from the movie, we are left with a saccharine aftertaste.

Nonetheless, Bountiful sprouts because of the inherent interest it encourages in the lives of these four characters. But the film is like a Texas-based Four Characters in Search of a Plot, with enough genuine emotion to sustain it, but not quite enough action to avoid straying into gratuitous sentimentality. The characters are all bursting with energy, but they are stifled by the formlessness of the script.

At times The Trip to Bountiful resembles an extended advertisement for Greyhound. As an old woman travels to her childhood home, we are shown innumerable shots of a bus outlined against the sublime Texas landscape. This cinematography is skillfully executed but too often drifts into triteness. One gets the feeling that there is a little too much Message (with a capital M) here.

Bountiful is not a film aimed at a college audience, but it is worth seeing nonetheless. One leaves the theater with a beautiful sense of the grandeur, contradictions, and irony in the landscape and society of Texas. We see women with beehive hairdos who drink Coca-Colas at the corner drugstore juxtaposed with the despair of fertile farmland gone bad.

But The Trip to Bountiful has gone a little stale, too. Like the old woman's homecoming, which is fraught with disappointment as well as joy, this film reaches its fruition with less than triumphant results.