An eleven-year-old girl watches her father come down with a crippling depression. Over one summer, she learns answers to several mysteries, and comes to terms with love and loss.
Fact-based biography of early film Producer and Director Bill Tilghman (Sam Elliott). Tilghman was a real-life cowboy, who rode with the Earps and faced down countless bad guys. When he ... See full summary »
Director:
John Kent Harrison
Stars:
Sam Elliott,
Arliss Howard,
Carolyn McCormick
A mysterious bomber is planting explosive devices in Seattle, Washington. Since their quality takes too big a toll amongst Seattle Police bomb experts, John Pierce, former head of the Bomb ... See full summary »
Director:
Roger Christian
Stars:
Sam Elliott,
Charles Martin Smith,
Kelly Benson
Bill wakes up from a coma in a hospital ward, raving about tissue regeneration experiments, final injections, organ transplants and having been cryogenically frozen. Battling flashbacks of ... See full summary »
Terri Hansen is discovered in the desert beside the blackened husk of her car which contains the charred corpse of her husband. When forensic evidence makes her out to be her husband's ... See full summary »
A mockumentary of pitching and filming television game show "Company Retreat," which places white collar workers on teams opposite their company's blue collar workers. The zany characters ... See full summary »
An eleven-year-old girl watches her father come down with a crippling depression. Over one summer, she learns answers to several mysteries, and comes to terms with love and loss.
The movie took place in 1974, as a radio played Richard Nixon's resignation announcement during one scene. See more »
Quotes
[first lines]
Adult Bo:
[narrating]
The summer my father was depressed the face of our Lord Jesus Christ appeared on a tortilla at the Taos Junction Cafe. It hung on a nail by the door, and pilgrims came to bear witness. Maria, who saw the face emerge and fainted dead away, wanted to shellac it to preserve it for all eternity. It was a wish of vanity, for she'd hoped only to extend her new-found notoriety. But time had its way, and within the years the face was gone, though something of its anguish ...
See more »
When a married Arlene Groden (Joan Allen) tells her house guest, William Gibbs (Jim True-Frost), that although it's nice he's expressed his love for her, it can be accounted for by the power of New Mexico, I knew I would express my love for this understated, eccentric, and satisfying film. While the two male heroes, Gibbs and Arlene's husband, Charley (Sam Neill), are both depressed in the clinical sense, the film is not about depression but rather the forces of devotion and simplicity that keep these retro-hippies functioning in a remote world somewhere around Santa Fe, Taos, and El Paso.
Narrator Bo Groden (as adult, Amy Brenneman and as 12 year old, Valentina de Angelis) reminisces as an adult in voice-over about that 6 months of her father's immobilizing depression in the seventies and her own freedom in that pristine land where she could hunt, plink, and create without restriction. Bo is not a wild child but rather a home-schooled, precociously sensitive pre-teen who plans to leave here as soon as possible while she regularly receives gift packages from manufacturers whom she has threatened to sue over allegedly contaminated products. Her nonchalant but effective treatment of her father in his funks is one of the many acts that assure us she is quite capable of surviving anywhere. Director Campbell Scott's determination not to fill us with back stories on all the characters makes for an energetic exploration of the way they are at this time.
Gibbs, who came from the IRS to audit the family, stays 8 years, long enough to paint New Mexican landscapes of note. His friendship with Charley is true and good, despite that fact that Charley probably knows Gibbs loves Arlene. Charley asks him, "Ever been depressed?" William replies, "I've never not been." Out of his passion for the landscape comes his sanity and a renewed interest in life that he seemed to have lost with the suicide of his mother, for which he feels responsible.
"I am a damn crying machine," Charley says. You may end up crying as well, but only because not enough movies like this are made where insights into humanity are as abundant as the Groden's garden and their four years' supply of homemade canned goods. Lafcadio Hearn could have been describing the Grodens when he said, "It is only in the home-relations that people are true enough to each other, --and show what human nature is, the beauty of it, the divinity of it."
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When a married Arlene Groden (Joan Allen) tells her house guest, William Gibbs (Jim True-Frost), that although it's nice he's expressed his love for her, it can be accounted for by the power of New Mexico, I knew I would express my love for this understated, eccentric, and satisfying film. While the two male heroes, Gibbs and Arlene's husband, Charley (Sam Neill), are both depressed in the clinical sense, the film is not about depression but rather the forces of devotion and simplicity that keep these retro-hippies functioning in a remote world somewhere around Santa Fe, Taos, and El Paso.
Narrator Bo Groden (as adult, Amy Brenneman and as 12 year old, Valentina de Angelis) reminisces as an adult in voice-over about that 6 months of her father's immobilizing depression in the seventies and her own freedom in that pristine land where she could hunt, plink, and create without restriction. Bo is not a wild child but rather a home-schooled, precociously sensitive pre-teen who plans to leave here as soon as possible while she regularly receives gift packages from manufacturers whom she has threatened to sue over allegedly contaminated products. Her nonchalant but effective treatment of her father in his funks is one of the many acts that assure us she is quite capable of surviving anywhere. Director Campbell Scott's determination not to fill us with back stories on all the characters makes for an energetic exploration of the way they are at this time.
Gibbs, who came from the IRS to audit the family, stays 8 years, long enough to paint New Mexican landscapes of note. His friendship with Charley is true and good, despite that fact that Charley probably knows Gibbs loves Arlene. Charley asks him, "Ever been depressed?" William replies, "I've never not been." Out of his passion for the landscape comes his sanity and a renewed interest in life that he seemed to have lost with the suicide of his mother, for which he feels responsible.
"I am a damn crying machine," Charley says. You may end up crying as well, but only because not enough movies like this are made where insights into humanity are as abundant as the Groden's garden and their four years' supply of homemade canned goods. Lafcadio Hearn could have been describing the Grodens when he said, "It is only in the home-relations that people are true enough to each other, --and show what human nature is, the beauty of it, the divinity of it."