Film Review: Main Street (2011)

“The Road Less Traveled: The In Home Movie Experience”

By Jordan Overstreet
Published: September 26, 2011

Whether you’re ready or not, the way we view motion pictures is changing. Unless you are a film student, an NBA star with a theatre in the basement, or a barnacle when it comes to change, the days of dinner and a movie are over. With Netflix, Amazon On Demand, Vudu, Hulu, and the classic cable On Demand library, screening movies at home is merely a click of the television remote or the computer mouse away.

In this trend to make content easily accessible to the consumer, many distributors are now incorporating an On Demand release into a movie’s distribution cycle, meaning that a given film would be released to the On Demand library the same day as it hits the stores in DVD form. Recently, in hopes to increase box-office revenue, some distributors have even gone so far as to release a movie to these cable companies before the title is even is listed on the marquee of a mega-plex.

Last Sunday, as my Friday morning hangover finally caught up with me, I took the road less traveled and explored the On Demand catalogue on my television. Hidden among the recent summer blockbusters and Steve Gutenberg dramas I found a familiar title: “Main Street.” I originally saw the movie in a market screening at the 63rd annual Festival de Cannes, so I was surprised to see it banished to what I consider to be the underworld of cinema. Whether it was pity or the just fact that nothing else was on, we will never know; nonetheless, I revisited the John Doyle film.

“Main Street” much like Jodi Markell’s 2010 venture, “A Loss of A Teardrop Diamond” is a posthumous work from a great playwright, Horton Foote. Foote, best known for “Tender Mercies,” “A Trip to Bountiful,” and recently Dividing the Estate, is very much in his element in this Southern melodrama, which follows the intersecting lives of various members of the dying Durham, North Carolina community. The film begins with a montage of black and white images of the once vibrant empire of the North Carolina tobacco industry. Doyle juxtaposes this with the present state of the town by returning to color and taking a trip down a desolate and empty main street.

The past continues to haunt the present as we are introduced to Georgiana Carr (Ellen Burstyn), the aging daughter of a tobacco millionaire, as she recants Durham’s “Golden Age” to a prospective realtor. Through a low, wide-angle shot, Doyle captures Georgiana sitting on the porch of her spacious white estate, which is reminiscent of a modern-day version of Blanche Dubois’ Belle Rive, in downtown Durham. Like the wrinkled Georgiana, the house too shows signs of aging--chipped paint, cobwebs. Doyle then pulls away to reveal a small compact car made in the 1990’s, suggesting Georgiana’s world is outmoded and she, herself, becomes an emblem of Durham’s decay.

As the city council meets to discuss ways to bring in new business, their only hope is the youth of Durham; however, that generation is incapable of reviving the town, considering many have moved away to pursue their own dreams. Moreover, the two youthful perspectives Foote gives us—Harris Parker (Orlando Bloom) and Mary Saunders (Amber Tamblyn)—are stagnant characters, trapped in their parents’ world with no signs of leaving anytime soon.

Enter Gus Leroy (Colin Firth), a Texan entrepreneur with an entourage—3 sterile white trucks filled with canisters of hazardous waste. Sporting an electric blue button down and black suede cowboy boots (very deus ex machina, no?), Leroy, who Georgianna’s new tenant in her downtown warehouse, saunters into town with a plan for rebirth: hazardous waste storage and management. Although Leroy’s presence in Durham ambiguous—is it a mere coincidence or divine intervention—he becomes, nevertheless, the city’s saving grace.

Firth, fresh off his Academy award win, is out of place in “Main Street.” His Southern drawl leaves his voice weak and disproportionate to the power his character represents. His speech is so withered that he seems to whisper his lines of dialogue, letting them crawl across the screen until they ultimately putter out and die.

While the premise of the film is an interesting and relevant one, the actual depiction of Foote’s idea falls flat at the hands of John Doyle, whose Broadway roots will not help him with his placement of the movie camera. However, it is fun to see the familiar faces of Ms. Burstyn, Mr. Firth, and Patricia Clarkson all in the same cinematic vehicle. For Horton Foote fans, this is a must see; for the rest of us, “Main Street” is a hopeful omen that there are still a few more dinner and movie dates to be had.