 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Newsday
January 24, 1997
By JOHN ANDERSON
A Soulful Portrait of the Farming Life
***1/2*
Part family album, part political protest and an irresistible portrait of farmers in crisis. If you don't love these people, well, maybe you should be foreclosing on farms.
OH GOOD GRIEF, I thought, as the opening moments of "Troublesome Creek" rolled across the screen: a farm film. Waves of grain, fruited plains, dispossessed people, tears of rage. And, ultimately, an unventable anger at bankers, bureaucrats and major corporations. Just what I need.
But it was. "Troublesome Creek" is no arid documentary about the farm crisis, or a political diatribe about unsolvable problems. Amid and around its very basic narrative — in which a family that has farmed its land for 125 years finds itself overextended and underappreciated — swirl the concepts of nationhood, history, the pursuit of happiness and the myths that America has subsisted on for centuries. And which, of course, are casually tossed aside whenever the overriding concept of money enters the picture.
It's also a genuinely honest portrait of a family, without any treacle, but with plenty of heart. Veteran independent filmmakers Jeanne Jordan and Steve Ascher decided to make this film when her father, Russell Jordan, decided to retire from farming. The crapshoot of paying off last year's loans with this year's crop had stopped paying out. Jim Jordan, one of Jeanne's brothers, had been farming leased property with the expectation of buying it, but the land was being sold out from under him. So the plan was for Russell and his wife, Mary Jane, to sell off everything and move to town; for Jim to work the Jordan place with his own equipment, and for one more farm family to reorder itself, and thus survive.
What we're privy to is not just a tragedy that's been repeated for years across the farmlands of America, but an intimate portrait of the Jordans, an intelligent, articulate group who defy every urbanite's stereotype of midwesterners or farmers (although another brother, Jon, does a dead-on imitation of that very stereotype).
The film, titled after the stream that runs across the Jordans' Iowa land, contains moments of almost overwhelming poignancy, and irony: Russell Jordan's affection for old westerns and their simple code of good and evil is made metaphoric by his own worrisome state of affairs. The auctioning of the Jordans' possessions is wrenching, but so are narrator Jeanne Jordan's reveries about growing up on the farm. Her reminiscence about spending time alone with her father, for instance — which was a rarity in such a large family — is an eloquent statement about parent-child relationships, but also about unsung emotion, something given eloquent voice in "Troublesome Creek."
If there's a flaw in the film, it's in the two filmmakers' reliance on arty shots when the landscape itself proves them unnecessary. But this is a small point. Many of us complain about the lack of substance or "decency" in the cinema, and many of us are right. Those who look to movies and find them wanting in basic human values should go to see "'Troublesome Creek," or stop making so much noise.