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DAILY NEWS
January 24, 1997
By Dave Kehr
How One Farmer Came a Cropper.
The factual `Troublesome Creek'
speaks eloquently for silo majority
***½
THE WINNER OF THE Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, Troublesome Creek" is a rich and thoughtful documentary that unfolds with the ease and emotional impact of a work of fiction. Jeanne Jordan, who wrote, directed and produced the film with her husband, Steven Ascher, is the youngest daughter of Russel Jordan, a monosyllabic and monolithic farmer who is the film's protagonist.
The Jordan family has been farming its substantial patch of Iowa since 1867, when the first Jordans arrived in a wagon train. But as the movie opens, in the spring of 1990, the economic cycle of expansion and collapse has turned on Russel and his wife, Mary Jane, and it looks as if this will be their last year working the family homestead.
Saddled with a $70,000 loan from a pitiless chain bank, the Jordans can only hold onto their land by auctioning off all their equipment and household goods. The farm will then be turned over to the Jordans' oldest son, Jim, who will move in with his own family and implements.
As the family sorts through its possessions in preparation for the auction, Jeanne sorts through her memories of growing up in rural America. It's a setting that, as she says, once seemed thoroughly — even oppressively — normal but now seems distant and exotic. A trip to the former county seat of Wiota reveals a once bustling main street devoid of any signs of human life. The farmhouse where she spent her earliest years is now a whistling ruin lost in an abandoned field.
Director Jordan gracefully expands the elegant images into expressive metaphors. The twisting creek that gives the film its title becomes an emblem of the Jordans' twisting fate.
The sadness of the family's departure is offset by Jeanne's reconciliation with her father, a moody, remote man who, in his old age, she is finally able to see as an individual saddled with his own shortcomings and redeemed by his flinty wit. Wisely, Jordan's narration never makes explicit reference to this aspect of "Troublesome Creek," but allows the feelings to flow with understated grace.