Back Roads

Back Roads

What we have here is a movie about a Good Ol’ Girl, made with the Good Ol’ Boy formula. The good ol’ individual gets into trouble with the law, teams up with another wanderer of the opposite sex and heads for California. After a series of adventures involving strange people and close calls, they learn to trust each other and believe in themselves more. The movie ends on a note of moral triumph: In this case, for example, the heroes find the courage to keep on heading for California.

I’m a little bit tempered in my enthusiasm for “Back Roads” because the film never met a cliché it didn’t like. One of the things that always happens in movies like this is that they populate their formula screenplay with bizarre, eccentric, colorful characters and remain under the delusion that this time they’ve found an original approach. They might have if those characters weren’t exactly the same ones discovered by previous movies.

In “Back Roads,” we are expected to be newly amazed by such strange types as tough-talking Latino madam, hard-drinking fight promoter, bullet-headed evil bruiser and homesick sailor all of whom we’ve met before. Nor are Sally Field’s hooker with a heart of gold or Tommy Lee Jones’s corrupt ex-prize-fighter with one good fight left any great shakes as originality goes.

How could they take this material and really make it original? Maybe by refusing to be seduced by those stock Hollywood “originalities” beloved of screenwriters who think that character can be added simply through mannerisms.

These schticks weigh down everyone so heavily laden with them hereabouts (and everywhere else too) so that no personality ever has chance bloom forth into being; people are reduced instead merely further instances being thrown onto already monumental pile thereof cheches about how she got to be a prostitute: taken advantage by sailor; gave up little boy for adoption; weeps every time she sees him walking into school; has prostitute herself in order eat. She meets another street person (Jones); he sleeps with her and doesn’t pay her; they team up together and hitch to the coast.

This is all straight out of romantic realism school Damon Runyon . Consider how much more interesting it would’ve been if characters this movie not only had life but also knew death well. Let’s face it: The Field character is a low life street hooker who’s over the hill.

In real life, she would undoubtedly be a drug addict or alcoholic. She’d hustle because she couldn’t get her act together long enough at one time for two consecutive hours of straight work and probably wouldn’t trust anyone either-, being so emotionally as well physically crippled by her habit that even trip California could kill somebody like me

On the contrary, instead of taking a car, the movie’s couple hitchhike for days. They sleep outside under the stars, get soaked in ditches, steal from cops and clients we’re supposed to buy that their continuing west is growth or bravery. No, it’s another self deluding getaway; if this film would face what its people are going through honestly, there’d be no need for all these eccentrics with hearts of gold cluttering up the place.

Watch Back Roads For Free On Gomovies.