The Trip To Bountiful movie review (1986)
"The Trip to Bountiful" has a quiet, understated feel for the small towns of its time. The little rural bus station, with its clerk drowsing under a lonely lamp bulb, looks just right, and so do the midnight streets outside. And when the sheriff arrives, alerted to look for a runaway old lady, it's perfect the way he and the ticket agent size up the situation and let Mrs. Watts have her last look at her childhood home.
Then her family arrives: her son Ludie (John Heard) and his wife Jessie Mae. Ludie really has his work cut out with these two women.
Both of them live at a time when many women lived their lives through their men, and there is not enough room inside Ludie's simple, desperate soul for both of them. Yet there is a moment of poetry as Mrs. Watts sits on the porch of the old farmhouse and talks about how she almost expected to see her own parents come walking through the door, just as if all those years had never passed, just as if her own lifetime was a dream, and she was a young girl again.
"The Trip to Bountiful" was written by Horton Foote, who based it on his own stage play. This is Foote's second recent slice of life from Texas; "Tender Mercies," the wonderful movie starring Robert Duvall as an alcoholic country singer, also was written by him. You can see that "Bountiful" was based on a play - it falls fairly obviously into three acts - but the rhythms and dialogue come out of unstudied real life.
And Geraldine Page inhabits the central role with authority and vinegar. The movie surprises us: It's not really about conflict between the generations, but about the impossibility of really understanding that you are even a member of an older generation, that decades have gone by.
Geraldine Page, who somehow always manages to have a hint of girlishness in all of her performances, who always seems to be up to something roguish and not ever quite ready to cave in to age, finds just the right notes in the final scenes to tell her son something he might never be able to understand: Someday he will be old, too, and he won't be able to believe it, either.
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