'Northfork' blends grit and poetry

Friday, July 25, 2003

By BILL WHITE
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

With "Northfork," the Polish brothers create a myth out of the death of an American town just as Sergio Leone mythologized the birth of America in "Once Upon a Time in the West." While Leone's town was born with the coming of the railroad, Northfork's death is brought on by the building of a dam.

MOVIE REVIEW

NORTHFORK

DIRECTOR: Michael Polish

CAST: Nick Nolte, James Woods, Anthony Edwards, Daryl Hannah,

Kyle Maclachlan, Mark Polish

RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for brief sexuality

WHERE: Uptown

GRADE: B+

The action takes place during the town's evacuation by a group of Ford-driving "men in black," who are promised an acre and a half of waterfront property in return for chasing 65 homesteaders from their soon-to-be-flooded property.

The film opens with a deceptive image that appears to be a coffin being brought to the shore by the tide. It continues with Nick Nolte's apocalyptic preacher prophesying the destruction of Northfork by water to a handful of people. Eventually it becomes apparent that Nolte is not predicting the apocalypse, but simply stating facts.

Rich in allusions, from the biblical (Noah's ark), the cinematic ("Fargo," "Time Bandits," "Men in Black"), and the literary ("The Waste Land," "Alice in Wonderland"), "Northfork" is a film open to individual interpretation. Its world is one in which extreme personal religious views create a madly poetic social undercurrent.

Much of the film occurs within the mind of a dying child as the last houses are evacuated. Storybook characters who have come in search of a lost angel must decide whether this little lost orphan is the object of their search.

Sometimes the child's hallucinations cross over to the real world, where guilt-ridden adults, such as James Woods' evacuator, must confront their own collaborations with death.

"Northfork" is a love letter to the state of Montana and a landscape that is biblical in its desolation and splendor. The lonesome mountains that disappear into the clouds offer a distant vision of paradise to those caught in the desolate lowlands about to be flooded by the water and power company.

The film is full of puns and sight gags. Odd characters, such as Ursula, the crone with the voice of a man, who makes her customers guess what is on the menu of her little diner, occupy the same world as the man with two wives who has turned his house into a boat and awaits a sign from God. The film creates a world in which the buffalo, as well as the jackalope, still roam.