(The length of this review has nothing to do with chemical stimulation, by the way -- the movie's about a subject I feel strongly about and it's made by a man I admire, so I've got lots to say.)
The review I'm writing of Sunshine State is different from the one I originally intended because Scott and I argued over the movie after we saw it. He didn't like it because he thought it was preachy and unsubtle. I'll concede John Sayles made his message clear, but I think it was more nuanced than that, though perhaps I'm projecting my own experience onto the film.
I wouldn't doubt Sunshine State is the only film to bring together Frederick Law Olmsted and Weeki Wachee mermaids -- and for that, I salute it. Rarely does a movie address the things I deal with in my job, plus Sayles is one of my idols, so I feel an automatic fondness for the movie. It shows a county commission hearing! Okay, so there's a reason why almost no other movie shows county commission hearings... but still. This is my world. (At the seminar I attended last weekend -- four days at a historic and therefore unairconditioned school in the company of architects from 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. every day -- where I was the only non-architect and therefore largely ignored, some of the attendees whined about how there are all these TV shows about doctors and lawyers but none about architects. This was right after they dismissed as a myth the notion that architects are often arrogant and self-aggrandizing.)
The setting is a Florida island teetering on the dividing line between the native working class and wealthy, out-of-state retirees. Development companies are competing to buy land and build golf-course "communities" and strip malls. The natives resent the invaders but rely on them -- the island's only visible industry is tourism. Everyone talks about how much better things were "before," but "before" is a vaguely defined time and often barely more historic than the plantation-evoking developments the "bad guys" want to build. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it seems significant to me that one of native Marly's fondest memories is the time she spent as a Weeki Wachee mermaid. I suppose Weeki Wachee Springs qualifies as historic by Florida standards, but it's basically a tourist trap that appropriated a myth to lend depth to its unabashed money-grubbing. (Don't get me wrong -- I dig Weeki Wachee and would be upset to see it go. I may never actually go there, although I hope someday I do, but somehow it's comforting and inspiring just to know it exists. You know -- like Yosemite.)
Everyone has his or her own agenda in opposing or promoting development on the island -- save the birds, preserve the black community, make money from bribes or selling out, or just a nebulous NIMBYism -- but no one seems to give a damn about the land itself, as a whole. Still, even though the island can never again be pristine, truly like it was "before," it shouldn't be abandoned to the highest bidder, to be turned into an exclusive enclave that puts "nature on a leash," as Alan King's bombastic developer puts it, so that Yankee retirees can boast about the natural beauty surrounding their McMansions without having to actually deal with any of nature's inconveniences. (Just wait till that first hurricane comes along...) And despite all the griping about developers, few people can be bothered to do anything about it -- even though elderly activist Dr. Lloyd (Bill Cobbs) goes door-to-door trying to drum up support for his crusade to keep developers from taking over part of the historic black neighborhood, the county commission hearing where these plans are debated is sparsely attended. People would rather go to the barbecue thrown by has-been football star Flash Phillips (Tom Wright) -- though he's just a front for a group of white investors.
Yet the claims the protesters have are tenuous. Dr. Lloyd isn't a native; he visited the island only on weekends until he retired. Marly (Edie Falco), who as a sixth-generation native might be expected to have the most passionate (and most legitimate) resistance to change, is tired of running her family's motel and restaurant and wants to get out. She doesn't much care when she's told a characterless strip mall would replace her motel. If the people who've spent their whole lives on the island don't care enough to fight for it and for their way of life, don't they deserve what they get? (You can bet they'll care when wealthy buyers crowd out the working-class natives, but by then it'll be too late.)
As always, Sayles gives his actors plenty of opportunities to shine. Edie Falco and Angela Bassett make the most of Sayles' talent for writing women's roles. Both are terrific at combining a weary fatalism with reluctant, suppressed optimism. Marly gave up her dream of becoming an oceanographer to be the dutiful daughter, and she's had a series of unsatisfying relationships, but despite her best attempts to be cynical and detached, she can't help hoping that this relationship, this decision, will turn out better. Bassett, as disgraced beauty queen Desiree, sent away from the island when she was 15 and pregnant, returns home with her new husband to make peace with her stern mother (the wonderful Mary Alice). Although she keeps muttering, "I shouldn't have come," she's just trying to convince herself, to tamp down the hope that led her to make the trip. Clearly the wounds of so long ago are still raw, as her pain burns through her careful facade of dispassion.
One of my arguments in disagreeing with Scott over the starkness of the moral choices Sayles presents was that none of the main characters are so clear-cut: Marly and Desiree, but also Timothy Hutton's character, a landscape architect (Jack Meadows, what Gene Weingarten would call an aptonym), working for one of the development companies. He's conflicted about his job -- touring a development site, he blithely discusses scooping up massive amounts of earth to create an artificial lake and a hill (which would increase the price of the house to be built atop it), but when he and Marly are paddling down a mangrove-lined river and she mentions that a company had tried to build on this land, he retorts defensively, "Not my company."
Mary Steenburgen is entertaining as a caricatured, high-strung Chamber of Commerce leader who runs Buccaneer Days, the kitschy celebration of dubious local history meant to draw tourists but largely ignored by the locals. In one of the movie's best lines, both for its wit and its encapsulation of one of Sayles' key themes, she wails, "People don't realize how hard it is to invent a tradition!"
Sayles often
has a problem with endings,
and the one he uses here (at least, the last shot) is heavy-handed and
obvious. But it's a small flaw in a layered film that addresses
issues
not often found in movies -- as Sayles put it in an interview with MovieMaker
Magazine, "what tourism does to people ... that very specific kind
of corporate tourism where you don't even own the restaurant
anymore—you
just work in it and you kind of become an employee. I'm also interested
in what happens when you sell your own culture and your own history and
kind of alter it to make it more sellable. Does it have any meaning to
you anymore or is it just a product?"
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