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The New Republic
February 17,1997
By STANLEY KAUFFMANN
Matters of Fact
Jeanne Jordan, born in Iowa, is a filmmaker and is married to another filmmaker, Steven Ascher; they live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jordan's family has been farming in Iowa since 1867. In 1990 her parents and her two brothers, still farming, got into financial trouble—more accurately, the constant financial struggle worsened. Her parents were going to sell off everything they owned, except the land itself, to pay their debts. They would move into the nearby town of Wiota. One of their sons, now renting a farm in the neighborhood, would move to the stripped family place, bring his own livestock and equipment and, so to speak, start the Jordan farm again. Jeanne Jordan and her husband, experienced in documentary, with family ties and with professional instincts, went out to film the transition.
Anyone who sees the result will be grateful. Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern
(Artistic License) is absolutely and completely what it ought to be, what we (consciously or not) want it to be: a family portrait; a quiet ode to quiet courage; a crystallized moment in the history of this country. Thus it is also moving, heartening, funny, depressing, nourishing. The film warms certain beliefs—in American grit and self-reliance. These beliefs may be mythic, but the two terms are not necessarily contradictory.
Troublesome Creek is in fact the name of the wandering stream that borders the Jordan place. The family itself puts Norman Rockwell to shame. Scene after scene just for one instance, the Thanksgiving Day dinner—could have been Rockwell subjects. But there's a difference: the Jordans know a good deal about the less picturesque aspects of their experience that were also components of the event.
The two most vivid portraits in the family are, inevitably, Jeanne Jordan's parents. Mary Jane Jordan, mother of six, former schoolteacher and state president of the 4-H club, has all the fullness of being we might expect, made all the more credible by her crotchets—her passion for collecting curiosities (odd silver spoons and such) and her refusal to sell them when everything else is going. Russell Jordan, large and calm, knows trouble and doesn't complain. Looking at photographs, we see how he and Mary Jane have changed through the years. They didn't merely grow old: they grew into seasoned antagonists of fate. Russell Jordan has Parkinson's and has been on medication for several years, but the tremor in his hand causes him no embarrassment. It is part of him now. He has no "view" of himself. One of the distinguishing features of most of the people in the film is that they have no view of themselves, as all of us these days are supposed to have. These people fill themselves to the brim. No room for what Goffman called "the presentation of self in every-day life."
The center of the film is the center of countless old melodramas—selling off the homestead to satisfy the bank. But, though not all the bankers are likable, they are not the villains. The villain is the changing shape of the American economy. In the 1960s, we're told, there were 6 million American farmers; now there are fewer than 2 million. Corporateness, as it's doing in so many areas, is taking over. Last autumn I visited the dairy-farm country in central New York where I used to work as a boy during the summers. My last summer was on what was then a good-size farm, with a herd of thirty cows. (I milked ten of them morning and night.) A thirty-cow farm would now be as likely as the use of horses: horses are as rare now as tractors were then. Milk comes from giant dairy establishments. Most of the farms I knew are now the vacation homes of city people, with the fields and pastures quite idle.
The Jordan sale, run by an experienced country auctioneer, is held on a blustery, snowy January day, yet hundreds of people show up—many of them to buy but some of them just to lend the Jordans the support of their presence. Jeanne Jordan, who is visible in some of the film (while her husband handles the camera), is there to greet friends. One elderly woman, a former neighbor, has driven 150 miles through the snow just to be with the Jordans on their difficult day. Jeanne Jordan, who was a child when she knew the woman, embraces her. A lot of dark aspects of this country are true; but so is that embrace.
Six months after the sale Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher return. Mr. and Mrs. Jordan are living in a small house in town, and Mr. Jordan goes out every day to the farm to help his son. At night he and his wife watch their westerns on TV. His hand trembles a bit more. Out at the old place Jim Jordan and his school-teacher wife don't yet know whether they will make it on the farm. They're trying.
Jeanne Jordan's occasional appearances on screen and her many helpful comments on the soundtrack under-score an extrinsic factor. A good deal ofthe course of this century is epitomized in the fact that a daughter of this old farming family became a filmmaker who recorded the changing fortunes of her family on film.