American Folk

American Folk

One way to know that the 9/11 wounds are healing is that someone has made a meet cute road movie about it.

That’s not entirely fair, maybe: Writer-director David Heinz’s “American Folk” is as deadly serious as they come. But whatever good movie there was in here and I suspect there was one got buried the moment Mr. Heinz decided to center it on a pair of attractive but generic young white people just like the ones who populate 90 percent of this country’s romantic comedies, including the indie versions; give them nothing much in the way of personalities as they drive their way from Los Angeles to New York City in a classic Volkswagen van-type thing of the kind driven by free spirited American movie characters, while interacting with supporting characters who function as patchwork squares on the Great American Quilt, etc., etc., America, America.

The film opens with Elliott (Joe Purdy), a slightly Brad Pitt-ish guitarist with an enormous, woolly beard, plucking his instument in a motel room and being ordered to shut up by somebody on the other side of the wall. The next day he boards a plane bound for New York, where he and his moderately popular band have a gig in three days, and finds himself sitting next to an attractive woman about his age named Joni (Amber Rubarth), who is going to New York because she needs to relieve her mother’s adult caregiver.

The plane turns around and lands because of the attacks. They take a cab out together; then they stay with Amber’s friend (Krisha Fairchild of “Krisha”), who loans them her van. They head East or so and meet all sorts of fine American types along their journey: an intense Vietnam vet played by David Fine; a lesbian couple (Miranda Hill and Emma Thatcher) who are hitchhiking out to visit family.

From there, the movie hits a lot of the expected traveling rom com beats: first big fight and reconciliation on a dusty desert road; moment when the duo goes into the motel room they just rented and realizes there’s only one bed; moment when both characters realize that the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. As all this happens, we hear (usually muffled) news reports playing in the background or on the van’s radio.

It may just be that I’m too close to these events still, but I cannot trust or like a movie in which the 9/11 attacks are reported periodically and yet barely spoken of by the main characters. This is all anyone could talk about for weeks after it happened at least for the first few days, anyway, during which time this film takes place. People were wired wherever you went; they seemed afraid of everyone else on the street; they talked about the world in a way most had never done before. It was raw stuff.

Now imagine that instead of being set in the days after 9/11, it took place in New York City four days after Pearl Harbor was bombed and we entered World War II against Japan and its Axis partners now ask yourself whether you find it believable that two people traveling from coast to coast would encounter this subject only tangentially, even if their radio only road trip did have long stretches where they mainly wondered whether they were going to get along with each other. (She sings and she’s good!)

There are some thoughtful bits here, including but not limited to the section with The Veteran, which is so powerfully performed by Fine that it suggests an altogether different film than the one we’re getting. In fact, give me the film starring Fine as its protagonist instead; or make it about the lesbian couple who provide refuge for a few hours; or let any of these brief encounters become something more than brief encounters. When every person your main characters meet is more interesting than your main characters themselves, there’s a core problem no amount of evocative cinematography or shrewd soundtrack curation can solve.

Far worse is what feels like a movie not knowing what it wants to say about 9/11 other than “Hey guys guess what we all have things in common like music! so let’s all try to be nicer to each other.” This is an observation so banal that it shouldn’t have been attached to a film set against the backdrop of attacks that killed thousands of people, most of whom died from smoke inhalation or were burned alive or got crushed by debris when the towers fell, which caused hundreds of thousands to lose someone they loved and changed the course of history in ways too numerous to mention.

Once you’ve pondered all that, it’s hard to give a damn whether Elliott makes his gig; and Joni’s mother may remind you what it was like being a sick shut-in in New York City during those days, though that only makes you wish there’d been another movie about her instead.

This movie of ours, the “Look at this great big wonderful weird country!” film, is a genre that works but rarely does. Someone like Robert Altman, or for that matter Richard Linklater, might have brought more emotion and intelligence to this kind of subject one that needs artistic and intellectual discipline without just making it seem crass (in fact they would probably have had to change it significantly). All those American flags and flag insignia everywhere are saying nothing except “Yeah, the flag, patriotism, it’s complicated.”

There are moments and images here that find exactly the right sort of semi-mysteriousness like when Elliot and Joni are leaving the airport in a taxi cab and the camera shows them from outside through the window while someone waves his or her hand fruitlessly at them to take one more passenger but they’re very rare.

The rest of this movie feels like a standard high-concept romantic comedy with 9/11 seriousness stapled onto it; there’s not much more going on than in any other such film made since 1988 or so. It’s not hard to imagine this same script being shot in around 1998 minus 9/11 content: probably starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew McConaughey as its young leads, Ellen Burstyn as the hippie who loans them her van for their trip home etc., Scott Glenn as the Vietnam vet.

I know how small this movie is; I don’t want to attack it for dumb little reasons. But every word on every page of this screenplay was a bad idea that no amount of talent could have saved.

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