Linda is still tormented by giving up a baby for adoption at 15. She wants a baby, but her husband has enough in his model trains, mistress and being a doctor.
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Title: Track 29 (1988)
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| Complete credited cast: | |||
| Theresa Russell | ... | Linda / Wife | |
| Gary Oldman | ... | Martin | |
| Christopher Lloyd | ... | Henry / Husband | |
| Colleen Camp | ... | Arlanda | |
| Sandra Bernhard | ... | Stein / Nurse | |
| Seymour Cassel | ... | Dr. Bernard | |
| Leon Rippy | ... | Trucker | |
 |
Vance Colvig Jr. | ... | Mr. Ennis (as Vance Colvig) |
|
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Kathryn Tomlinson | ... | Receptionist |
|
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Elijah Perry | ... | Redneck (as Jerry Rushing) |
|
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Tommy Hull | ... | Counterman |
|
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J. Michael Hunter | ... | Waiter |
| Richard K. Olsen | ... | Delegate | |
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Ted Barrow | ... | Old Man |
A doctor's wife tires of his obsession with model trains, and spends her days wondering about the son she gave up for adoption at birth. While eating at a roadside café, she encounters a British hitchhiker, who turns out to be her son. They spend time together trying to find a bond. The son begins to hate the husband, and the wife begins worrying about the safety of her husband and his train set. Written by Ed Sutton <esutton@mindspring.com>
The bored, lonely wife of a retirement-home physician in North Carolina dreams up an adult embodiment of the baby boy taken away from her when she was an unmarried teenager who got knocked-up at the county fair. Her husband, a train enthusiast, has no patience with his wife's melancholia and cheats on her with his lascivious nurse, while the young man/substitute son comes to represent the wife's anger and isolation. Disconnected filmmaker Nicolas Roeg predictably provides no simple solutions for our heroine, and screenwriter Dennis Potter (who would seem to be the perfect movie-companion for Roeg) merrily keeps the inscrutable scenario on a schizophrenic track. This isn't the weirdest movie to come from either Roeg or Potter--the film, in fact, is one of Roeg's more accessible entries--but very few of the details or ideas come to fruition (such as the wife always being dressed in lavender, or her fetish for cartoons and dolls). Gary Oldman, just off "Sid and Nancy", seems stuck in a revolving door of violent angst and aggression (only in a later scene at the piano does he show some charm), while Christopher Lloyd (as Henry Henry--perhaps an ancestor of Humbert Humbert) relies far too much on his rubbery facial expressions. In the lead, Theresa Russell works hard at conveying her character's inner-demons; in the vivid flashback scenes to her youth, she makes a terrific impression just by using her faraway eyes and smile. However, Russell never gets her little-girl twang quite right--her voice sounds disembodied--and her temper tantrums aren't shaped and have no comic pay-off (which is the fault of the director, who turns a blind eye). After the perverse-glossiness of something like 1986's "Blue Velvet", the scrubby ordinariness of "Track 29" is disappointing and dispiriting (it was shot by Alex Thomson, who has worked with Roeg before). Roeg, a brilliant cinematographer in his youth, gets a kinetic vibe going in the flashbacks to the fairground; however, aside from those startling early shots and some stray funny moments, "Track 29" seems to lose its way awfully soon, and the apocalyptic final act is simply a mess. *1/2 from ****