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- guardian.co.uk, Friday July 26 2002 01.59 BST
- The Guardian, Friday July 26 2002
Sunshine State ****
Dir: John Sayles
With: Angela Bassett, Edie Falco, James McDaniel, Ralph Waite, Richard Edson, Miguel Ferrer, Timothy Hutton, Mary Steenburgen, Jane Alexander
141 mins, cert 15
www.sonyclassics.com/sunshinestate
John Sayles, the screen dramatist of non-Hollywood north American life, here stages a characteristically humane and sweetly optimistic ensemble piece about families and communities in a crumbling beach resort in Florida, the "sunshine state". Here is a place being continuously and insidiously eroded by developers, despoiling the natural wilderness for condos, hotels, malls and, most of all, golf courses - those luxurious, undulating ersatz-natural landscapes where retired white people expend their new leisure. Sunshine State has plenty of besuited corporate types bullying folks into selling up and moving out, and a corrupt local politico, too, handing out zoning permits, seen with bundles of hundred-dollar bills secretly duct-taped to his waist.
But for all this, Sayles's movie does not have the fierce, Day-Glo satire of, say, Carl Hiaasen's novels about Florida's creeps and crooks. The light he conjures up, like his mood, is gentle and muted. This is a film of warm sunshine in which townsfolk and tourists can happily stroll, enjoying quaint civic parades. It is a movie washed with the pale, salty feel of the end of a day at the beach, a film of pleasing sunsets and balmy walks in the moonlight. And despite the anger shown in some scenes where elderly community leaders rage ineffectively against the developers, the human emotions being played out in this arena are contained, elegiac: as if all the pain and turbulence are essentially in the past. But the past is a fraught and contested site which, like the sunshine state itself, can either be left pristine or concreted over. And what remains in the cinematic present is a rueful, humorous, but painful reopening of wounds that have not quite healed.
The complicated lives of the folk who live in Delrona Beach, Florida, are interspersed with scenes featuring a chorus of four old geezers playing golf, evidently the prosperous pioneers of Florida's development, popping up throughout the narrative on the fairway or the green, genially squabbling about whether or not "nature" is worth saving. "Who needs a lizard the size of a 12-passenger van?" shrugs one. "Nature is overrated." "You'll miss it when it's gone," smiles another. And so the curiously ambiguous, seriocomic tone is set by this pleasingly stylised device for Sayles's human stories.
Edie Falco plays Marly, a hard-drinking late-thirtysomething woman, working at her dad's motel and diner, hassled by her good-for-nothing ex-husband and pining for a way out of there. It is a very different performance from the bourgeois self-loathing of her famous role as the gangster's wife, Carmela Soprano. Despite looking careworn, here she shows she can seem younger than she actually is - not so very far from the naive smalltown girl she played in Eric Mendelsohn's Judy Berlin.
On the other side of Florida's racial divide, Angela Bassett plays Desiree, a woman of Marly's age who had to leave town at 15 when she became pregnant, and has only now returned with her handsome anaesthetist husband Reggie (James McDaniel). Desiree is quite terrified of seeing her formidable mother again: Eunice, a churchgoing pillar of the community played by Mary Alice. Alice's presence is partly what makes this film's representation of the middle-class genteel African-American community so reminiscent of Charles Burnett's 1990 movie To Sleep with Anger (recently re-released in the UK), in which she also starred. Like that film, Sayles's has an unfashionable, quietist view of race politics.
As it happens, Eunice is looking after a 13-year-old boy called Terrell, who's in dire trouble with the law for burning down the local parade float. But he is not exactly someone with fierce gangsta attitude, or, apparently, any friends his own age. Like the movie itself, he seems lucid and calm. He appears neither to suffer from racism, nor to express racial anger. (Oddly, a tiny comment on race and politics is subliminally disclosed when Reggie is helping to redecorate one of the rooms, and in the background a sheet of old newspaper shows an ad for Ralph Ellison's posthumously published novel Juneteenth, about a black minister and a bigoted white senator. Whether or not the subsequent resonances are accidental, they certainly lend a frisson of some kind.)
Sayles draws the connecting web between these characters by having Marly's mother Delia (Jane Alexander) run the community theatre in which Desiree first shone. She is shown here rehearsing a play - not Thornton Wilder's Our Town; maybe Sayles thought that a trifle too obvious - but a lugubrious adaptation of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. And most melancholy of all is parade organiser Francine (Mary Steenburgen), desperately trying to persuade the locals to be interested in all the area's culture and customs. "They don't realise how difficult it is to invent a tradition!" she wails.
The difficulty of history - authentic or otherwise - is something that Sayles has explored before. In Limbo, a marooned family on an island discover the diaries of those stranded there a hundred years before and start to think of themselves as re-enacting their experience. In Lone Star, the discovery of a skeleton is the premise for a debate about history, politics and revisionism. In Sunshine State, the contention is all about prehistory being effaced: the natural world becoming replaced by human commerce, and Florida assuming a post-natural identity as a tourist paradise. It is hard to tell from this wry, sad movie, which combines realism with whimsy, whether this is an outrage or merely a shame. But the diminution of natural beauty in the sunshine state certainly functions as a pungent metaphor for the erosion of youth and the scars of adult survival.
