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New York Press
January 22, 1997
By GODFREY CHESHIRE
Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher's Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern is one of those documentaries that's issue oriented, at least by a certain definition, but that ultimately proves far more valuable for the purely human testament it provides.
In saying that, I don't mean to slight the issue of American farmers losing their family homesteads to looming economic forces or imply that films shouldn't deal with such subjects in a general way. It just seems to me that films that resemble investigative reports or op-ed pieces can never hold a candle to one like Troublesome Creek, which is as personal as a diary and as engrossing as a novel.
I tend to think its makers would agree that the film has gathered such a large crop of honors (it won both the Grand Jury Prize and audience award as Best Documentary at Sundance last year, an Academy Award nomination as Best Feature Documentary, etc.)
thanks in part to the rich material fate handed them. In 1990, Jeanne Jordan's family, which had been farming the same Iowa land for 125 years, faced the impending likelihood that it was about to go out of business. Filmmakers Jordan and Ascher, her husband, left Boston determined to film whatever came next, a gamble that resulted in a piece of Americana so archetypal it's a wonder we haven't seen similar accounts before.
Jordan, though, was obviously unusually fortunate in having such a trove of family artifacts and lore to draw on. The film's early sections use an amazing array of anecdotes and old photographs to trace her family's journey across the plains and establishment as farmers in Iowa, at a time when the wildness of the West (which the film memorializes and brackets with irony via clips from various old westerns) wasn't always a matter of myth.
Arriving at her family's recent troubles, Jordan finds anger–especially from her taciturn father and not-so-taciturn brothers—at a system where the old personal relations between farmers and small-town banks have been replaced by uncaring corporate efficiency. Ironically, her family survived the boom-and-bust vicissitudes of the 80s, when government loan policies helped engender a wave of foreclosures, only to hit a brick wall of debt in the 90s.
The result is that Russ and Mary Jane, Jordan's septuagenarian parents, decide to auction off their farm implements and most of their household goods and move off their land so that, after the family's debts are retired, the younger generation will have a chance to continue as farmers. The decision is as tough as it sounds, though the eventual outcome is anything but unrelievedly harsh: freed from the constant cares of farm life, dour Russ discovers an optimistic streak in his nature, and even smiles once or twice.
But the film's center is his and Mary Jane's departure from the farm, an episode full of comic detail and resonant sadness. Russ walks away from the cows he must sell without being able to say a word, while Mary Jane's face as her beloved dining room table goes on the block speaks melancholy volumes. Meanwhile, a younger generation of Jordans—and a large supporting cast of friends and neighbors—looks on, no doubt wondering if fate holds the same for them.
Jeanne Jordan's narration notes that, contrary to the common image of omnivorous agribusiness combines, most small farmers who sell out do so to other farmers. While that fact poses the reality as more complicated than many ideological descriptions might suggest, it doesn't change the painful transition that this modest, fascinating, beautifully-shaped film chronicles: the passage from localized, nearly self-sufficient cultures to one of ubiquitous dependencies.