Awkward 'Brigham City' on a Mormon mission

Awkward 'Brigham City' on a Mormon mission

Friday, April 13, 2001

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Richard Dutcher, the writer/producer/director/star of "Brigham City" is a one-man cinematic Mormon missionary.

MOVIE REVIEW

BRIGHAM CITY

DIRECTOR: Richard Dutcher

CAST: Richard Dutcher, Matthew A. Brown, Wilford Brimley, Carrie Morgan

RUNNING TIME: 119 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for violence and brief violent imagery

WHERE: Bella Bottega

GRADE: C

And, in the approach of a recent spate of religious movies, he's put his message in a film that tries to break free of the stigma that keeps most overtly faith-based productions out of general release. It's a good-faith effort, if not completely successful.

Ostensibly a modern thriller about a serial killer set loose in rural northwest Utah, "Brigham City" plays like a contemporary western, with an upright county sheriff, Wes (Dutcher), who is also a Mormon bishop.

Like the marshal of a peaceful frontier community, he first tries to shield his town from the horror, then pulls the good churchgoing citizens into a veritable posse, shattering constitutional rights in a desperate attempt to save a kidnapped girl from the killer.

It's a rather naive kind of frontier justice, with Wes crossing constitutional lines for the greater good, and Dutcher never quite gets around to dealing with the implications, as if those questions are unnecessary in a community where public welfare is more important than legal formalities.

Dutcher's heart is in the right place, creating a portrait of family values, community ties and neighborly caring with an honest, unaffected forthrightness, but his cinematic skills are clumsy and he directs with a measured carefulness that smothers spontaneity.

He lingers over every clue and draws out red herrings with numbing overkill. His blunt, dawdling direction (the two-hour film is a half -hour too long) is out of place in a genre where inference and economy rule, and his own central performance has neither the nuance nor the commanding presence to firmly anchor the film in a moral stolidity.

To its credit, "Brigham City" grapples sincerely with issues of faith, responsibility, fear and community solidarity versus insularity ("You had enough of the real world yet?" Wes asks his eager, restless deputy Terry (Matthew A. Brown) after the second murder). Dutcher's characters depend on their faith and resort to prayer in times of trouble, but he makes the case that fear and suspicion are the real snake in Eden.