God's Country

Saw God's Country, a provocatively named but sleepy film about the farming village of Glencoe Minnesota. The film starts off talking to an old woman in a bonnet that extends about two feet in front of her face. She's tending flowers and says she doesn't care much for the big city, all the while grinning and chuckling with embarrassment. It's an adorable introduction to the town. Yes, it is a small conservative town, but there's a stoicism here, a zen calm. Differences are not approved of, but they are tolerated.

The film explores the town by a kind of random walk. We discover that the parents of an anti-Vietnam War protester live in town. We drop in and find that the protester's mother sits on the local town council. She also writes plays. Here's the leading man of her most recent play. He inseminates cows for a living. The film continues in this meandering way. The subjects are given freedom to talk, often revealingly, about their lives and aspirations. They're never drawn out into embarrassing admissions of racism or sexism. In a six-years-later coda, we get some nice crazy-talk about the Jews who rule the banking system, but for the most part, we are gazing into the navel of middle-America, Everytown USA. They are charming and warm people. Not as progressive as we'd perhaps like, but they claim to live and let live, so alright.

This meandering zen is interrupted a bit by that six-years-later epilogue. In addition to the antisemitism appearing seemingly out of nowhere, there's economic angst thick in the air, hints at the coming diploma-bubble, and finally a dour speech about how Americans must abandon this path of senseless greed they're on, delivered by a white-haired lawyer. His stern face freezes and the credits roll over it. I mean, okay I agree, but wow film, way to get preachy all of a sudden. Perhaps the filmmaker himself had grown a bit and was less interested in capturing an abstract America, and more interested in the troubled waters below the deceptively calm surface. It feels like another documentary suddenly burst through.

Anyway, that incongruity aside, the film is lovely and bucolic. It's a bit of a lie, as the epilogue reveals, but it's a pretty lie and that's sometimes the best we can hope for from films, even documentaries.