Almost Salinas

Almost Salinas

“Almost Salinas” is a sweet and kindly portrait of an empty crossroads and the people who live there, or are brought into their lives. Too bad about the plot. The people are real but the story devices are clunkers from Fiction 101; the movie earns goodwill in its set up, but in the last act it goes crazy with revelations and secrets and dramatic gestures. The movie is set in Cholame, the California town near where James Dean died in 1955, and maybe the only way to save it would have been to leave out everything involving James Dean.

John Mahoney stars as Max Harris, who runs a diner in a thinly populated backwater. He’s thinking of reopening the old gas station. Virginia Madsen is Clare, his waitress, and other locals include Nate Davis as an old-timer who peddles James Dean souvenirs from a roadside table, and Ian Gomez, as the salt of the earth cook.

The town experiences an unusual flurry of activity. A film crew arrives to shoot a movie about the death of James Dean. Max’s ex-wife Allie (Lindsay Crouse) turns up. And a magazine writer named Nina Ellington (Linda Emond) arrives to do a feature about the re-opening of the gas station. If this seems like an unlikely subject for a story, consider that she stays so long she could do her reporting on the reopening of a refinery. She gradually falls in love with Max, while one of the young members of the film crew falls for Clare’s young assistant behind the counter.

The place and people are fine. Mahoney has that gift for quiet believability; his Max seems reliable, gentle and loyal. Madsen is the sparkplug here not a stereotyped gum chewing hash-slinger but a woman who takes interest in whoever comes her way. Emond isn’t very convincing as the visiting reporter, maybe because her job is so unlikely. Better, perhaps, to make her a woman with no reason at all to be in Cholame, let her stay because she has no place better to go, and then let her fall in love.

From the movie’s opening moments, there are quick black-and-white shots of Dean’s 1955 Porsche Spyder racing along a rural highway toward its rendezvous with death. The arrival of the film crew, with its own model of the same car, introduces a series of parallels between past and present that would be unfair to reveal.

Spoiler warning! Without giving everything away, let us note that it is unlikely for a character who was locally famous in 1955 to stay in the same area and become anonymous just by changing his name. It is also unlikely for him to have been moved, all those years later, to the acts he takes in this film. And cosmically unlikely for them to have the results they do. Not to mention how pissed off the film company would be.

With the movie’s great revelations beginning to come into view, I shifted down in my seat. I was scared that the straightforward and charming story of these good folks would be overshadowed by mechanical plot contrivance. And I was right to be afraid. “Almost Salinas” gains immense viewer support only to squander it on characters who are sacrificed for the sake of a pathetic and sympathetic plot that ends up prompting nothing but groans and eye-rolling, unfortunately.

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