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Granola Le Règle du Jeu, John Sayles with friends and tripod at a New Hampshire lake house taking stock of the counterculture. High-school teachers with "socialistic tendencies" (Bruce MacDonald, Maggie Renzi) host a weekend gathering of chums, guests include a guitar-strumming wastrel (Adam LeFevre), a medical intern (Maggie Cousineau), a couple on the rocks (Mark Arnott, Karen Trott), and a political speechwriter (Jean Passanante) with the beau "who still cries whenever he hears the Gettysburg address" (Gordon Clapp). Charades, skinny-dipping and shagging on the living-room floor are the activities, weed is the nostalgic lubricator at hand, "what's a reunion without a little drama?" The fellas work out their tensions on the basketball court, the gals fret over their biological clocks until they spot overworked suburban moms ("There but for the grace of Ovral-21 go I"). Reviewers bring up The Big Chill, but who remembers Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000? The play-within-a-play calls perhaps unwise attention to acting style, the hoops-shooting sequence registers a novelist's discovery of montage. The specter of youthful engagement hangs over everybody—evoking Allende and the Canal Treaty at the watering hole, mimicking the strike chants from Biberman's Salt of the Earth in jail, trying to convince yourself that a job as a senator's aide is really that of a subversive infiltrator. The character who recalls protest-related arrests like tattered medals is last seen exhausted, with axe in hand surrounded by piles of splintered wood. "Straighter than it used to be," can the struggle survive the new decade? Until then, there's a rare glimpse of David Strathairn's early apprenticeship as a clown, and the melancholy irony of aging activists professing disappointment with Carter while unaware of the Reaganisms up ahead. With Carolyn Brooks, Eric Forsythe, and Brian Johnson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |