It
is like a film noir in the middle of an Andrew Wyeth painting, except these are
the plains of Saskatchewan rather than the hardscrabble fields of Maine. It is
even as quiet as a canvas at times. That can be both good and bad, but at least
it suggests some integrity of vision on the part of screenwriter-director Jefferson
Moneo when giving his prior short film the feature treatment. Rural Canada gets
dark and dangerous in Moneo’s Big Muddy (trailer here), which screens
this weekend at the Catskills’ Mountain Cinema.
Martha
Barlow and her current man, Tommy Valente, are no Bonnie and Clyde. Frankly,
they are pretty crummy people, who specialize in liquoring up poor slobs, to
set them up for subsequent home invasion robberies. At least, Barlow loves her
moody son Andy. She just cannot help surrounding him with chaos. She ain’t seen
nothing yet.
Unbeknownst
to Barlow, her former lover Donovan Fournier is out to find her, having escaped
from his prison farm. Even more ominously, Buford Carver, the horse race fixing
gangster who came somewhere between Fournier and Valente, is back in town with
a new horse and all kinds of bad intentions. Worried about the influence he exerts
over her son, Barlow agrees to meet him at the track, but when Valente crashes
the party with a gun and a poorly thought through plan things get very bad,
especially for Carver’s prized horse. Suddenly, Barlow and her son are on the
run, with a satchel full of Carver’s cash and a couple of highly irritated
gangsters on their tail.
The
two twains of Muddy will meet in
Barlow’s rustic hometown, where she and Andy crash with her less than thrilled
old man, Stan. In fact, Moneo handles the intersection of the two major plot
lines quite deftly. However, he sure loves character-establishing scenes of
Andy and Grandpa stringing up barbed wire fences. The truth is an editor with a
free hand could easily trim fifteen or twenty minutes of Muddy without any ill consequences, but that is hardly unusual
these days.
Happily,
Muddy features the craggy gravitas of
Stephen McHattie as Grandpa Stan. As usual, he commands the screen with his forceful
badassery. On the other hand, Nadia Litz and David La Haye are not bad per se, but
they make the strangest looking couple as Barlow and Fournier. James Le Gros is
also reliably villainous, but his Carver seems a bit restrained when it comes
to chewing the scenery and talking the trash.