As you may have noticed, the much touted '90s "angel craze" is still going strong in the '00s. And venturing beyond Charlie's benign buns-of-steel babes and Kevin Smith's dogmatic Bible humpers, lots of little films have suggested that said flying furies actually play havoc with troubled kids' fantasy lives. In Rebecca Miller's 1996 Angela, the protag is tormented by visions of a pasty, life-size archangel curled in her bedroom corner. This year's Blue Car and Lilya 4-Ever feature children who drift into angel madness and surrender to its deadly swoon. Now Michael and Mark Polish deliver Northfork, a surreal fable in which events surrounding a mid-century Montana town's dam-necessitated evacuation blur with the seraphic fever dreams of a sick orphan.
photo: Andre Blaise
Heavenly creature Daryl Hannah in Northfork
Details
Northfork
Directed by Michael Polish
Written by Mark & Michael Polish
Paramount Classics
Opens July 11, at the Angelika
KM.0
Written and directed by Juan Luis Iborra and Yolanda García Serrano
TLA
Opens July 11, at the Sunshine
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This last of the brothers' American heartland trilogy (including 1999's Twin Falls Idaho and 2001's Jackpot) suffers from their trademark self-satisfaction, but as with Idaho, a suffused empathy nearly makes up for the belaboring of key messages—in Idaho,reaction shots denoting Michelle Hicks's compassion for the titular conjoined twins. This time it's unearthed graves and telltale markers of conformism among henchmen (James Woods among them) sent to evict the town's most intransigent holdouts. To the Polishes' credit, these evictions are ambitiously tracked through the warped imagination of bedridden little Irwin (newcomer Duel Farnes), ministered to in a church infirmary by half-mad pastor Nick Nolte. The boy's meager effects spur fantasies of his own divinity and provide the attributes of a makeshift family of angels he seeks to rejoin: androgyne parent Flower Hercules (Daryl Hannah), scientist-savant Happy (Anthony Edwards), and British sourpuss Cup of Tea (Robert Sachs). The Northwestern panoramas feel doomed enough to sustain the ambiguity of Irwin's perspective (we're never sure how much of his exchanges are really happening) as well as the film's ongoing Revelation-tinged confrontations between the dam-building capitalists and wild-eyed homesteaders. But unlike documentarian Travis Wilkerson's recent meditation on Butte's bloody history, An Injury to One, Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West.
"I'm your guardian angel," says a gay beer-hoisting bon vivant in Km.0 to a straight civil servant he's cajoled bar-ward. The uptight clerk is supposed to meet a hooker, who's mistakenly strolled off with a filmmaker who was supposed to be meeting an actress friend (who has wrangled an audition with a famous director by throwing herself in front of his car). Km.0's serendipitous hookups ultimately involve 14 characters, including a gay gigolo, a marriage-mad gamine, her fiancé-nicking little sister, two playful gay stallions who meet to screw but end up in love, and a matron sugar mama—all of whose stories spin out from Madrid's central plaza. Aiming for Almodóvar lite, the flick is more reminiscent of The Love Boat—drenched this time in cheery polysexuality. Everyone is an angel (and a horny little devil) in this breezy earthly trifle, even if the zaniness never quite takes wing.
