URL: http://flakmag.com/film/sunshine.html

  
   <h>Sunshine State
   <h>dir. John Sayles
   

   <p>The torching of a tacky float during "Buccaneer Days" opens John
   Sayles' Sunshine State. Pirates of all types abound in fictional
   Plantation Island, Fla., a small town suffering its conversion from a
   place of character and history into one of those upscale, pastel
   resorts you speed past on I-95. The ensemble cast is split by the
   dividing line of the movie's primary concern: To sell out or not sell
   out? As it's Florida, there's plenty of sun, sea and palms, golfers in
   white slacks, weary locals in denims; and, as it's John Sayles
   territory, our sympathies are meant to fall wholly on the side of the
   grassroots townies.

   <p>The heart of the film is split between two daughters. Marly Temple
   (Edie Falco) is the proprietor of a small motel; after getting dumped
   by her golf-pro boyfriend, she couples up with a nicer example of one
   of the enemy, landscape architect Jack Meadows (Timothy Hutton). Marly
   longs to sell the motel her father (a grizzled, speechifying Ralph
   Waite) has pushed on her as his personal dream to maintain. A former
   "Weeki Wachee Mermaid," Marly exudes a knowing world-weariness, the
   threat of the encroaching developers awakening in her a desire for
   flight. By contrast, Desiree Perry (Angela Bassett) returns to
   next-town-over Lincoln Beach (based on the actual African-American
   community of American Beach, Fla., founded in 1935) to wrestle with a
   difficult mother and finds herself staying to fight for the home from
   which she was exiled years before. As in Sayles' Passion Fish, two
   women, one immobilized and white, the other itinerant and black, share
   the emotional center of the film. The social ecosystem around these
   women gradually reveals itself as a net that grips, either as a trap
   or as necessary support.

   <p>In weaving his morality play, Sayles has chosen sides and doles out
   the vice and virtue in a straightforward, if simplistic, manner. Those
   on the side of maintaining the old community have all the dignity,
   pathos and deeply felt issues to be played out; those who favor
   gentrification have all the neuroses -- they are suicidal gambling
   addicts, bitter former beauty queens, wounded semi-pro athletes turned
   car salesmen, heartless local politicos, clownish fat golfers, trailer
   park Civil War reenactors.

   <p>The decks are stacked against these folks, at times mere foils to
   Sayles' soapboxing. Francine Pickney (Mary Steenburgen) is the town's
   Chamber of Commerce queen bee, an archetype dusted off from nearly
   every Robert Altman film, married to troubled banker Earl Pickney
   (Gordon Clapp, the wimpy cop from "NYPD Blue"). Flash Philips (Tom
   Wright) is the ex-linebacker (he skipped out long ago after getting a
   teenage Angela Bassett pregnant) hired as front man for a car
   dealership, itself the front for some nameless, faceless corporate
   entity buying up all the homes in Lincoln Beach. Miguel Ferrer has a
   too-brief gem of a scene planning his hard-sell strategy like a
   wartime general. Alan King and Clifton James are two stogie-chomping
   golfers who eventually run out of green, playing ironic Greek chorus
   to the proceedings ("Nature! Who needs it?") These are folks, Sayles
   tells us with the subtlety of tractors plowing through an ancient
   Indian graveyard, neither to be pitied nor trusted; they are, in the
   end, comic relief.

   <p>In a similar dramatic cul de sac, Sayles shows the same love of loose
   ends he practiced in Limbo, by dealing us a big wooden red herring of
   a plot point. Acting teacher Delia Temple, played by former NEA
   chairwoman Jane Alexander, hires a pyromaniac teen to build her a
   coffin for her upcoming solo performance of Faulkner's "As I Lay
   Dying." Beyond two minor scenes involving the construction and
   delivery of the coffin, nothing else ever comes of this
   (ever-unoccupied) box. This all seems to be Sayles at his most
   didactic: Is he in mourning for the NEA, paved over by the new
   anti-art morality?

   <p>The film's strength is quieter than Sayles' politics, which, despite
   his broad strokes, displays genuine, adult interest in the demarcation
   of character (refreshing in this summer of animated sci-fi
   spectacles). People decide to sell out, love, forgive or remain
   entrenched in their need to believe in the American dream; and their
   paths shift, slightly yet deeply. Even the climax is a minor, if
   momentous, affair: What halts the progress (or destruction) is not the
   human endeavor on either side of the battle, but the ghosts of the
   past. The dead demand attention, and rising from their graves
   (literally), they stop the major conflict of Sunshine State in its
   tracks.

   <p>The powerbrokers, the moneymen, the sharks in on the money trail, all
   leave town when the tractors halt. Men leave, Sayles seems to say;
   they are either walking out on women or paving over things. What's
   left in the vacuum is the film's true concern: the women who have to
   clean things up. Sayles may be his own best example of a male involved
   in his own drama while a quieter, more human story resolves itself on
   the sidelines. This character-driven quality has always been in
   Sayles' films, and bringing together such distinct concerns as
   presenting broad social canvas, as in Matewan, and telling the
   African-American's story undiluted, as in The Brother From Another
   Planet, makes Sunshine State his most comprehensive film to date. And
   he does it quietly: The prodigal daughter who has returned is able to
   stay, and the one who had been stuck at home has, like all true
   mermaids, returned to the sea.

   -- <p>Stephen Bracco
  