Years ago we had a backpacking buddy who used to reference this film's line "wake it and shake it you Stampers" whenever he'd wake us up to get hiking on cold early mornings. I was always curious about the film and thought we'd include it. Somehow I had the idea in my head that this would be like Grizzly Adams but with a heartwarming family tale behind it. I could not have been more wrong!
Specs:
Almost 2 hours. Rated PG. (This is not a "typical" PG film by modern standards).
Our average rating on a scale of 1-10:
5.38
More about the film and our reaction to it:
This film gets some dubious distinctions in our fest. It is our 4th LOWEST rated film overall. In fact this is our lowest rated film since 1935's Becky Sharp, and one of only 6 in our festival that received less than a "6" average score. Perhaps it is not fair to say that we hated the film or that the film was bad, but better to say that the film was wholly unsuited to our purposes. I strongly encourage you and your family to skip this one.
The film is rated the equivalent of PG, which just showcases the shortcoming of ratings in trying to convey audience appropriateness. It is shot in a slow, plodding, 70s era style. The natural locations were gorgeous, I guess, but the film never felt lovely or attractive, because the whole thing was shrouded in a dark complicated tone of family disharmony. There was a constant sense of foreboding that terrible things would be happening. And it was the tone that made the film very hard to watch. In fact, many terrible things do happen in this picture.
The story is about a proud and defiant logging family headed by Henry Fonda and with Paul Newman as the eldest son. They stand up in principle against a logging union that is strongarming them into not cutting wood in order to raise prices. However, the Stampers do what they see is right, and do not cower under threat of violence. As good as that might sound in terms of providing positive role models, the film is not meant to be a positive story of standing up for what's right, so much as a depressing exposition of a disfunctional family's ambiguous principals. The film explores adult themes of divorce and blended family along with much younger second wife having a quasi-incestuous relationship with one of the sons. It also involves two horrific logging accidents and a very grotesque (in my opinion) display at the end that is played for humor.
(Welcome to the 1970s! I should probably have known/noticed that this was an adaptation of a Ken Kesey novel and was unlikely to be a good choice. ha. I guess maybe you have to be from the 70s - as our backpacking partner was - to enjoy this type of stuff.)
Let me be clear: I'm not saying the film was poorly made or bad, but rather that it was not at all what I meant to pick for our enjoyable family festival. If you do want to watch this one with kids, I'd suggest that you know your kids and their tolerances and I'd still suggest a pre-watch just to make sure you know what you're in for.
Truth is, we realized early on that this film was not a good fit for us and didn't really "watch" it. After about the first 30 minutes or so, we started skipping on fast forward and pulling out various scenes to watch. We sort of skip-watched the whole thing.
Iconic image:
No comments:
Post a Comment