Rambling Rose and RIFF

Yesterday was the second and final day of the Rome (Georgia) International Film Festival.

I’m sad to say I had to miss almost all of it. But the final event—a showing of the film RAMBLING ROSE followed by a discussion with the film’s director, Martha Coolidge—was quite something.

Coolidge’s strengths as a director are meticulous attention to the intention of the screenwriter, a sharp sense of place, and wonderful casting. Her other signature movie is the also underrated VALLEY GIRL—the best mock of the spirit of the Sixties ever (thanks to a very funny and strangely touching performance by Sonny Bono) and what might well still remain Nicolas Cage’s most striking and manly performance. VALLEY GIRL and RAMBLING ROSE both present real men, real women, and real families both flourishing in and transcending the peculiar conventions of distinctively American times and places.

RAMBLING ROSE has a few flaws—including its cornpone and quite unnecessary introduction and conclusion—that cause it to fall short of greatness.

But its virtues begin with one of Robert Duvall’s (our best actor at his best) most memorable and subtle performances. We see the Christian Duvall in TENDER MERCIES (maybe THE outstanding American film) and THE APOSTLE (a bit-over-the-top but very deep). RAMBLING ROSE gives us the pagan or Stoic Duvall, who presents nearly the full range of the greatness and misery of our classically literary South.

Atticus Finch is a somewhat incredibly one-dimensional lonely Stoic patriarch (or dad), and the Gregory Peck portrayal is noble but boring. The Duvall character—Daddy Hillyer—is fully of irony and wit and chivalry and classical allusions without literary pretensions. But he is still flawed, and his equally sort-of-philosphic literary (historian) wife (played by Diane Ladd) —in touch with the source of the creative energy of the universe and full of the protective love of the mother of us all—has to save him from being seduced by the eugenic cruelty of modern science. Her fierce defense of her (adopted) daughter (and fellow orphan) reminded him to think and feel like a father.

It turns out a complete family needs both manly honor and courage and unflinching responsibility and the feminine realism that flows from personal love and so justice rightly understood. Its amazing the extent to which this movie celebrates marital fidelity and familial duty, the reconciliation of magnanmity and justice, and the transformation of “base love” into “higher [but still intensely personal] love” without any explicit debt to Christianity.

RAMBLING ROSE also includes two of the best acted and most edifying sex scenes every filmed. Rose, the hyper-promiscuous teenage live-in hired help played wonderfully by Laura Dern, both fails in her aggressive seduction of the Duvall character (he fends her off, he proclaims, the way the Persians weren’t allowed to pass as Thermopylae) and is seduced by the clinically curious oldest son—the most brilliant of their children, his mother explains, but with “an evil streak.” This movie, to say the least, is hard on uninhibited curiosity and the clinical view of human sexuality. (The physician from the North is quite the evildoing Progressive—I’ll have to explain later.)

The children in this movie, I could go on, are probably meant to remind us, at first, of Scout and Jem from TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, but they are much more interesting and far more realistic.

But I have to cut this off: The script for this movie was written by Calder Willingham and based on the book he wrote of the same name. Willingham contributed to the screenplays of more of the AFI’s top hundred films than any other author and was also quite a successful and almost-great novelist. He grew up in Rome, GA, and RAMBLING ROSE is semautobiographical. For financial reasons, the filming was done in the Wilmington, NC area, but its a tribute to the director that everything looks as if it could be Rome, GA in 1935.