
Sunshine State
dir. John Sayles
Sony Pictures Classics
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Stephen Bracco (sbracco@yahoo.com)