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Film: Dam depressing

Northfork drowns in surreal, philosophical shallowness

By Anthony Allison

"I'm a man of faith, forgiveness is my job," growls Northfork's grieving priest, Nick Nolte. "But now I can't forgive my faith."

It's also hard to forgive the Polish twins--director Michael and co-writer/actor Mark--whose idiosyncratic third film is set in the titular, fictional 1950s Montana town that's about to be flooded by a hydroelectric dam project.

Peppered with heavy-handed religious symbolism, Northfork aims to be a deep, meaningful meditation on death and rebirth, belonging and rootlessness, fantasy and reality. But this ponderous, poetic allegory about faith and the afterlife--about literally and figuratively moving on--paradoxically drowns in philosophical shallowness.

With the dam's completion date rapidly approaching, six "evacuation committee" agents, (including Peter Coyote and James Woods who, with his son Mark Polish, faces the disquieting task of disinterring his wife's body from the soon-to-be-flooded cemetery), try persuading the few remaining townsfolk to leave. Among them is a latter-day Noah (Marshall Bell) who's built an ark, and a trigger-happy citizen (Mark Twogood) with his feet nailed, crucifixion-style, to the floorboards. Meanwhile, Rev. Nolte cares for terminally ill orphan Duel Farnes, whose fevered dreams feature an unlikely quartet of earthbound angels: mellifluous-voiced Robin Sachs, mournful Daryl Hannah, mute Ben Foster and visually impaired, armless Anthony Edwards.

The Polish brothers, who followed Twin Falls Idaho, their auspicious debut about conjoined twins, with Jackpot, the disappointing saga of a wannabe karaoke star, aim to create a North American version of magical realism, deliberately blurring dream and reality. Their surreal vision sure is striking. M. David Mullen's desaturated cinematography reduces big-sky vistas and smoky interiors bisected by beams of heavenly light, to disconcerting shades of gray.

But unlike David Lynch's quixotic oddity or the Coen brothers' quicksilver inventiveness, the Polish brothers' style seems too mannered, too cerebral for their own good. Unlike Wim Wenders' angel movie Wings of Desire, there's no sense of awe and wonderment here. And the halfhearted attempts at deadpan humor are so dry they don't lighten this unleavened saga with so much as a smile. As the narrative unfolds, with oodles of style but too little substance, you can't help praying the damn dam spillway would hurry up and close--unleashing the slowly rising deluge that will drown these bizarre characters and their godforsaken rural backwater forever.

Spinoff tactics

Here's what Hollywood requires from its Spinoff Weapons and Tactics unit: a familiar old TV title that'll appeal to boomers but allows scope for guns, a gal, product placement and big, explosive setpieces to wow the mindless teen moviegoing demographic.

S.W.A.T. is yet another flagrant bid to profit from the built-in spinoff audience. But compared to that other, dismal '70s TV ripoff, Charlie's Angels, this one feels like a veritable masterpiece of the genre.

The plot (L.A.P.D.'s crack S.W.A.T. squad is drafted to escort French drug boss Olivier Martinez to federal prison) is predictable, but at least it's coherent.

Colin Farrell's bushy eyebrows compete with Girlfight star Michelle Rodriguez's trademark furrowed brow for the title of most distracting facial feature, and totally upstage everyone else, including James Todd Smith (the artist formerly known as LL Cool J), the ever-charismatic Samuel L. Jackson and his fellow S.W.A.T. officer Reginald Cathey.

But from a tense bank siege opening, through a slick, hijacked plane-storming exercise, to the inevitable ludicrous climax, director Clark Johnson deploys his cop show-honed special tactics well, using his L.A. locations more effectively than the Italian Job remake and threading Barry DeVorzon's familiar TV theme seamlessly through the soundtrack. Which just goes to show, when high-budget hokum is well-crafted and played straight by a decent cast, it almost becomes watchable.