(Ed. Note: This was originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.)
“We are all angels. It is what we do with our wings that separates us.”
(Yes, that is actually a line from the film…)
Northfork is a deceptively simple story as bare as its 1950’s Montana backdrop. In a mostly vacant town about to be submerged beneath the reservoir of a new hydroelectric dam, a little orphaned boy named Irwin lies fitfully at the hallucinogenic edge of death in the gentle care of a limping priest. Most of the people have already left, and the last few hold-outs are being “relocated” by three two-man evacuation teams. Each team has been comfortably supplied with clean black sedans and a special box whose contents are designed to be an encouragement to those who take the team’s advice. Save for an embittered shotgun owner and a man who plans to brave the flood with his wives (yes, plural) in a homemade ark, the teams are for the most part successful and fill the otherwise empty film with bits of screwball dialogue and the occasionally appropriate sight gag.
The Polish brothers so far have found a niche market on bleakness. With films like Twin Falls, Idaho and Jackpot they have honed their talents at visual reduction, at creating tired little worlds and stories with startlingly few embellishments. In Northfork their decision to eradicate any color but shades of grey for the entire wardrobe is an indication of how far they are willing to go to create these open spaces.
And Northfork certainly is an open space.
It is dominated by the steel grey hills of Montana and the cool shadows of the new dam. Just in case anything else snuck in, the cinematographer was careful to bleach all life from this sterile backdrop through some digital manipulation.
That is until we meet Irwin’s dreamscape companions to the edge of his own evacuation, a relatively colorful bunch of rag-tag angels apparently on the search for a special angel. But between the four of them, and their individually absurd characteristics, they hardly seem to make a functioning whole.
It is at this point that Northfork becomes a movie that feels like it was directed by steadfast cinephiles, thankfully drawing on some of my favorite films. Darryl Hannah quite obviously and successfully channels her andriodic androgyny from Blade Runner. The tightly shot opening sequence is right out of Bresson’s more focused moments. The surrealist angel scenes are right next door to Lynch’s red room sequences, even though the costuming of these characters reminds me of Gilliam at his best. The brilliant play with color took me back to the evergreen forests of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. There is an over-determined play with dialogue that hints at the “regionalism” of the Coen brothers. I could probably conjure up a few more…
But in spite of all of this, it is with chagrin that I say Northforkdoesn’t work very well. I am on board with the agenda, with the effort. But the film’s vision is much deeper than the film itself. There are all the elements of an invigorating intra-textual epic. One in which the slick self-referentiality alone closes the film on itself, rendering it opaque enough to stand on its own two feet. This could be a “Montana Mulholland Drive” or a “Naked Lunch out on the range.” But there is good abstraction and there is bad abstraction.
The broad range of details and storylines the Polish brothers attempt to incorporate only really ends up relating in a tangential manner. Being comfortable with not knowing what is going on is fine with me, and I don’t even mind if I know I am not being taken anywhere. But Northfork doesn’t really seem to have the power to go beyond its own confines, and thus leaves little elbow room for the imagination. At one point we meet an ambulatory quadruped that is the random psychedelic generation of some unknown origin. Though it does lead the boy to a house he needs to visit, all it really does is to serve as a symbol of the state of consciousness of the young boy. That’s it. Its form is by no means related to its purpose. So even though it is interesting, it verges on fading away into the film as an empty sign, an entity bent on short circuiting itself.
Northfork is cluttered with such dead ends. Same with the snowy split through the house that the angels seem to occupy. It is a wonderful image, but pretty much a dead end in meaning.
Northfork is worth seeing – and on the big screen – for one reason: it is simply and purely gorgeous. Even though its imagery is not as well thought through as it could be, it is expertly presented and the film does leave us with a divinely memorable sense of the poetic in the tragic life of this young boy.