New John Sayles film "Sunshine State" looks excellent -- Final End

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Date Posted: 00:53:51 06/30/02 Sun
Author: Drummond
Subject: New John Sayles film "Sunshine State" looks excellent

From www.sfbg.com

If anybody sees it, I'd like to hear about it as it won't come to my area for about a month.

Beachfront property
John Sayles skewers the Sunshine State.

By David Fear
FLORIDA, THE 27th state of the union and last stop on the great American Southern highway, has garnered a pretty bad reputation. Its history is littered with slaughtered Indians and pilfered gold, French-settler massacres and alleged fountains of youth. Today it's a sunny depository of the socioeconomic melting pot and a locus of corporate America, with contributions to modern culture that read like a litany of pop and political disasters. Disney World, teeny-bop impresario Lou Perlman, Anita Bryant, Limp Bizkit, and the 2000 presidential-election debacle can all claim Florida as their home turf. Dangling on the edge of the continent like a limp phallus, Florida is either a spoil of manifest destiny or shorthand for a dream headed irrevocably southward, depending on which side of the economic fence you find yourself standing on.

Florida's past and present play a key role in the topography of writer-director-independent cinema icon John Sayles's latest opus, Sunshine State. Its denizens know where they've been and where they are; what's less certain is where they are going. And though the titular geographical location provides a ready-made social context, the spiritual rot Sayles finds lurking in the strip malls and swamplands extends far past the state line.

Both of State's locations and their residents have seen better times: Delrona Beach was a prime tourist spot prior to the Epcot epoch, and Lincoln Beach's stronghold as a unified African American neighborhood during the civil rights era made it a beacon of hope. Now both areas are under siege by real estate developers hoping to buy the land for chain stores and gated communities. Marly (Edie Falco) runs the dilapidated motel and restaurant her now-senile dad built up, which sits on primo waterfront property in Delrona. A young architect (Timothy Hutton) hired by the developers sparks a feeling in Marly that a way out may lie in selling out, while Lincoln Beach elders Dr. Lloyd (Bill Cobbs) and Eunice Stokes (Mary Alice) attempt to bring together their fragmented town to keep Lincoln's past alive.

Into the mix walks Desiree (Angela Bassett), Eunice's daughter and one of Lincoln's former golden girls, forced to leave town years ago after an unwanted pregnancy tarnished the family name. Exorcising demons with her new "Northern" husband (James McDaniel) in tow, she's returned to prove to everyone that she turned out OK. Her hometown, however, hasn't. Its one genuine star, prematurely retired Heisman winner "Flash" Phillips (Tom Wright), is trading on his name to convince the struggling populace that developers' money is the key to happiness. And the town's next generation, in the form of an arson-loving teenager named Tyrell (Alexander Lewis), suggests that even if a payoff happens, the kids of Lincoln aren't going to be alright either.

The irresistible engine of "progress" and the immovable ghosts of the past, Floridian or otherwise, are the two constants in Sunshine State's sea of variables. Once a proud example of unity in the face of segregation's adversity, the denizens of Lincoln Beach seem to have lost their sense of footing as they traveled from the era of Jim Crow to that of Jeb Bush. The Delrona Beach Chamber of Commerce has resorted to manufacturing pirated tradition in the form of "Buccaneer Days," a pathetic celebration of the region's semifictional history as a home to thieves and scoundrels. Their latter-day counterparts, the developers, have no problem plowing past history in the name of tomorrow's homogeneity. Personal signposts of old glories and shameful memories dog the characters around every turn, reminding them of how far they have, or haven't, gone. Even the symbol of the sunshine state's wild, woolly outback days, the 'gator, makes a stoic appearance as a mobile tourist attraction in the caged cab of a pickup. You can view him for a buck.

The genesis of Sunshine State was itself rooted in the past, specifically the early '90s, when Sayles was writing a short story for Esquire on treasure hunters working near the Florida Keys. When he returned a decade later in the hopes of adapting his story into a movie, he didn't recognize the place. "The small-town Florida that I remembered was gone. It just wasn't there anymore," the filmmaker recounted while in San Francisco recently. "This tacky kind of mom-and-pop tourism, where at least the locals owned the hotel and the restaurant, had been swept away by this wave of what seemed like corporate tourism. You couldn't go two miles without seeing a Wings [a Florida bathing suit chain store] or a this-and-that doughnuts, one right after the other. It was an endless loop."

Juggling close to a dozen characters and weaving several narrative strands together, State's saving grace lies squarely in its maker's affinity for capturing the rhythms of real life. Few directors write dialogue for actors or understand the pace of living as well as Sayles, and even when social agendas threaten to detrimentally breach his films' surfaces, the power of performance always redeems his rhetorical leanings. There isn't a bad turn in the bunch here. Bassett, notorious for overenunciating every line to the point of proclamation in the past, underplays her role in a way that emphasizes resignation even in her character's victory lap. Falco's boozy portrayal of a heart buried under years of dampened hope will be a revelation for those who know her only as a mezzo-Soprano; her bruised look out of a motel window after a lover inadvertently insults her is a clinic in how to get more from less. Even stock roles such as Miguel Ferrer's oil-slick businessman and Mary Steenburgen's put-on-a-happy-face housewife avoid parody by tapping a very real sense of weariness.

State's ensemble mosaic bears a resemblance to the director's earlier, underrated 1991 film City of Hope, which also mixes multiple stories with polemics on the corrupting power of capitalism run rampant and is set in a specific locale (New Jersey). But if a precedent in the Sayles filmography is needed, a better companion piece might be Lone Star. Both films deal with the legacy of the South, both deal with subtle and recognizable racism, and both emphasize owning up to the past. But as Lone Star's protagonists sit in front of a blank screen, ready to wipe the slate clean and "forget the Alamo," State's ending suggests that no matter how many times you plow over what's come before, the past always rises up again.

"It seems like commercial interests dictate the culture entirely now, always eyeing some eternal tomorrow," Sayles mused. "But history has the last laugh here." He smiled. "It always does."

'Sunshine State' opens Fri/28 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.

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