Christopher N Rowley (2006)
Bonneville was given only a very limited theatrical release in the US, some 18 months after it was screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006. It got no release at all in this country but it’s turned up on television a couple of times recently. It’s half-road movie, half-TV-movie: you can understand why it was a commercial failure in the cinema and why it’s regarded as suitable teatime fare by Channel 5. The movie, like the 1990 Coupe de Ville, takes its name from the protagonists’ car, although Bonneville also refers to a key location on the journey from Pocatello, Idaho to Montecito, California – the Bonneville Salt Flats in Northwestern Utah. The three travellers in Coupe de Ville were brothers. Here, they’re middle-aged friends – Arvilla (Jessica Lange), Margene (Kathy Bates) and Carol (Joan Allen). The recently widowed Arvilla has been given an ultimatum by her late husband Joe’s gruesome daughter, Francine (Christine Baranski): either Arvilla returns Joe’s ashes to the family in California in time for his funeral or Francine will evict her from the house which Joe left to his daughter in a will that he never got round to changing. Arvilla reluctantly agrees to deliver the ashes to Montecito. Her friends Margene, several years a widow, and Carol, a Mormon wife and mother, go along for the ride. Along the way, they give a lift to a young hitchhiker (Victor Rasuk) and meet a truck-driver (Tom Skerritt), with whom Margene develops a lonelyhearts friendship. Also during the course of her travels, Arvilla scatters part of the contents of the urn in various places that Joe loved. There’s very little left in it by the time Joe’s remains are handed over at the memorial service, where the wicked stepdaughter Francine trips and shatters the urn. The story is framed by a voiceover from Arvilla – in the form of a letter to Francine, in which Arvilla explains why she did what she did.
Most of the company on the journey is very agreeable and the mechanical combination of tears and smiles is less annoying than it deserves to be. Even so, Bonneville is so thin and determinedly innocuous that you’re relieved when it’s over. It’s a tribute to Jessica Lange that she manages to seem reasonably true throughout the succession of ashes-scattering close-ups and to Kathy Bates that, although Margene is required repeatedly to hoot with laughter, she doesn’t get on your nerves. The gentle romance between Bates and Tom Skerritt has some depth as well as a lot of charm (there are few actors better equipped than Skerritt to illuminate niceness, even though you feel that quality is merely being exploited here). The role of the devout Mormon Carol is a thankless one, of course. She has to react with horror to the taste of coffee and with hysterical incredulity to winning money on a fruit machine in a Las Vegas casino etc. Even allowing for this, Joan Allen is on a different, more remote wavelength from the others. Victor Rasuk is likeable (although again pure niceness) as the hitchhiker. Arvilla was much younger than Joe but Christine Baranski is so severely groomed as Francine that she looks nearly old enough to be Jessica Lange’s mother. (Joe died in Borneo and I got the idea from the opening scenes that he and Arvilla were anthropologists who spent much of their time there but I may have got the wrong end of the stick. This is never followed through, at any rate.) Although it’s Francine’s who meant to be humourless and self-righteous, Arvilla’s narrative is full of tired bits of homespun homily. The director Christopher N Rowley has yet to complete another feature film (although one’s in post-production according to IMDB). Rowley co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel D Davis (who has just this one credit on IMDB).
27 December 2012
