Tommy Lee Jones is very good as a director, as his academic presentation of material feels the constant presence of the "old" school. The actor sits in the chair of the director with a certain age fatigue, in order to once again tell the world about what it was like to live in distant places long before we were born. His “Local” treats the pastorals of the Wild West, where life was not sugar, from which people were twisted into a ram’s horn and put in a box at the mere thought of oppressive hopelessness. This western is tractive, depressive and gloomy, but it is worth watching at least once in order to plunge into the abyss of a disgraced being.
Glendon Sworthout’s novel lay on the fertile ground of the modern era, when the power of women was spoken with renewed energy, shooting more films about the struggle for their rights, where one or another heroine acts against everything for a purpose or task. Here is approximately a similar situation, when Tommy Lee Jones pushes four girls to the forefront, deprived against the background of a rabid poor, constant lack of money and a tough household woman not only of a happy fate, but even of her own awareness. Now someone will talk about feminism, but in those years, such a situation should be considered as the inexorable fate of many conquerors of the Frontier.
The early death of children, the lack of harvest and normal living conditions, harassing men and the lack of any prospects in the future can break anyone. In the story, three women go crazy under similar circumstances, and society makes a decision almost immediately - they say, you need to send the blessed to the East coast, they will be better there. As they say, out of sight - out of heart, as if they were never near us. This is best illustrated by the examples of weak men who share the views of the arrogant community. Put crazy people in the cart, wave goodbye and all - remember the name.
Of course, at the peak of time, the strong and independent Mary B agrees to cross the continent, played by Hilary Swank, whose manner of playing literally feels at some subtle level of spectator material when you take the rules of the game on faith. Is it possible to call her the one who stops the horse or knocks off the head of the offender? Undoubtedly, but if it seems like an agenda now, in the context of the Wild West, it could have been easy, because times were tough. It is she who agrees to lead a mourning procession to transport three poor people to the nucleus of sorrow on the other side of the country.
Tommy Lee Jones himself skillfully takes the role of an old soldier Briggs, who seems to be the main rudiment of the departing breed of single heroes, absolutely unable to take root anywhere, just to finally settle down and live normally. We meet him with a noose around his neck, which is another knyxen in the direction of famous westerns, when swaying on a bitch in the last seconds of life was not yet posturing or secondary. The director presents the story of his hero simply, somewhat rudely and seriously, but even Western, to talk about people within the framework of animal naturalism, when you can kill an opponent only for the sake of a girl, a drink or a saddle.
“Local” looks with a certain degree of doubt, because to the last it is not very clear what the author is talking about. Jones skillfully plays with concepts about the old order, including the difficult share of immigrants, whose huts and small stretches of land seem to them no longer that possessions, but rather a pedigree curse. The viewer clearly sees that the heroes have no plans for the future, as at the same time greedy capitalists drive out those in need in the cold, which leads to very sad consequences in the future. The director is concerned that he takes as a basis such a heavy and powerful imperative of suffering and forgiveness.
In fact, “Local” seems to be another road movie, during which two main characters wander along the road of repentance. One is already very old, the other is suitable for him as a daughter, so there is hardly any semblance of love between them. Of course, eroticism in the picture is to a small extent, but mainly this film is about another, namely about the endless string of loneliness, madness and bitter losses in the history of mankind. Characters are connected by a strong rope of fate, which does not give them high heads, because some of them are not given so many days to feel filled with life.
Briggs will not change, as can be seen in the final lines, and Mary B is destined to go alone, because men shun her proud appearance. Everyone here is tormented by their own demons, trying to beat as much as possible and more often, from which we can conclude that history is cyclical, since we are still unable to find our place in the sun. The first is devoured by harsh reality, the second is ruined by their own greed or greed, and only the third hardly find a small share of peace, but it turns out that not all. The truth is bitter as dry wormwood, but you can choke on it if you eat too much.
Otherwise, the “Local” serves as an arena for criticism of the established masses, where poorer people walk barefoot on the ground, when at the same time the shops are bursting with expensive shoes. Jones teaches the surrounding landscape in a very natural way, so you believe him and begin to take into account certain awkward little things. A doll in the hands of a madman, a tombstone floating along the river, depreciated money clutched in the fist of a visitor, or a horse released from the reins as payment for passing through Indian lands. Sometimes you want to forget how a mother throws a child from unconsciousness into a cesspool, because this is beyond normality.
Tommy Lee Jones within the boundaries of the genre manages to tell a sad and long story about the fact that we all in one way or another become fugitives, gallows, and madmen under the yoke of the circumstances that surround us. Just someone breaks immediately, and someone only with time, that's all. The “local” is exactly what it is; nucleus, gloomy and miserly in joy, but this is indicative when the dull and desolate edges of the West are replaced by the juicy colors of the East Coast. We seem to return to the usual habitat at a time when one of the heroes again goes to where people are killed, shooting in saloons and robbing travelers.
7 out of 10
Hard movie. Very heavy movie. This drama caught my attention with its cast. Tommy Lee Jones is a famous and wonderful actor who has played a lot of roles in movies I love. As an actor, I have long appreciated and respected him, and Johns also tried himself as a director, and of course he played the main roles in his films. This film is the fourth film directed by this actor and director.
This is the time of the American West. The main character (strong and brave, but single woman) agrees to transfer three mentally ill women (child killers) from Nebraska to Iowa. The road is very long and dangerous. As assistants, she takes a man outside the law, and they are waiting for a long journey that will prove fatal.
Watching this story, you feel all the pain and hardships of the main character. She was a very strong woman and a very inspiring character. Her story is tragic and I couldn’t forget it for a long time. With this role, the winner of two Academy Awards for Best Actress and the nominee of many other acting awards Hilary Swank coped perfectly. She is a strong and deep actress, and that role was hers. When watching the film, I always wondered why this heroine has such an unfair and sad fate. She is a decent woman who has never seen anything in her life, not a single ray of hope for happiness. Very sad and sad.
The pain and desperation in this story resonated in each new scene. It was so dark, so cold. The movie leaves a dark mark on the soul, and he thinks for a long time, analyzes everything. The film did not pay off in his homeland, but in Europe it was well received, and the picture even received a nomination for the Palme d’Or, which emphasizes the importance of this drama. Jones himself played the main role in his film perfectly. His hero was so natural, so simple, outlawed, but with his charm. The actor, even in old age, remains charming and charismatic.
Crazy women were played by Sonya Richter, Miranda Otto and Grace Gummer. All these actresses played grimly their mentally ill heroines. Most of all, one of the daughters of the beautiful Maryl Streep (who was also pleasant to see in a small role) was remembered. She is a young actress and I think she has a promising future. I look forward to new, deep and diverse roles.
This movie is like a bleeding wound. The picture reeks of pain and despair. Everything in her seems so hopeless and painful. The only light is the main characters who unshakably go to their goal, to save sick girls. The film turned out to be deep, but it is for a narrow category of viewers, for those who love and appreciate depressing dramas.
"Local" is a 2014 Western-flavored drama by Tomy Lee Jones. The film is strong, but its story is dark, full of grief, loneliness and injustice.
Tommy Lee Jones again pleases us with an atypical western - no shootouts and fights in the saloons, as well as the Indians. The meaning in this film is very deep and lies not far from the surface, although many, unfortunately, never saw it.
What is this movie about?
- A harsh and grim reality in which no one seems to find their place. The hero of Jones (Briggs) is an old bully, in the past a very famous criminal in the wild west, who understands that, in fact, he spent his life in vain. He fills his grief with booze and does not mind making money by helping the heroine Swank (Cuddy) transport 3 crazy women. Cuddy also experiences a personal drama, and only after, the viewer will know how deep she is - she is a strong personality, a rich farmer, but still an old maid.
Why do you want to be crazy?
- Thus, we are once again told about the hopelessness of the situation for all the heroes. Mental disorder is a way of escape from a cruel reality, a consequence of the fact that common sense cannot accept everything that is happening around.
It’s also about Briggs and Cuddy’s true sense of duty (as opposed to what other members of the community think) and the latter understands deep down that it’s her life’s business, and perhaps the whole “life” is coming to its sad and natural end. And Briggs at least now, in his old age, is trying to somehow correct his mistakes and do the right thing, because in general, he is not a bad person. At first it seems that he is not interested in anything but money and drink.
The film is very dark with a viscous atmosphere and violent scenes of violence.
10 out of 10
From Unforgiveness to Atonement, or Feminnowwestern
1855. Difficult times of mastering the Wild West, which is cruel and inhospitable to all who first found themselves here - among the vast, going somewhere in the shaky distance of the desert of nauseating yellow sands and suffocating in its sultry prairie. Alien, dangerous lands, where the alien entrance is ordered, and if it comes out, then only forward with your feet, and your... There are probably not many of them, and most of them are cowboys, hunters of Indian heads, the Indians themselves, zealously defending their territorial limits, and just outcasts looking for their place in the sun.
Mary B is one of the rare breeds of women in the Wild West who will walk into Uncle Tom's burning hut, and the horse will stop at a jump, and make something else. Her life is as loose and rough as the land that belongs to her and which she is forced to cultivate in agony. Becoming a savior and just a friend to a cowboy no less dragged by life than herself, named George Briggs, Mary B agrees to his request to help her transfer three mentally ill women from Nebraska to Iowa for a digestible reward. However, from the very beginning, the journey does not promise to be cloudless.
The film-participant of the competition program of last year’s Cannes Film Festival, “Local” 2014 became the fourth full-length directorial work of the famous American actor Tommy Lee Jones and the third in a row of his appeal to such a natively American genre of cinema as the western after the debut television picture “Old, Good Guys” in 1995 and the cult “Three Graves of Melquiades Estrada”, which in 2005 became one of the main Cannes triumphants. It seems that Tommy Lee Jones, with his new picture, which received a rather contradictory reaction from both the public and critics at the exit and left Cannes unsaltedly, without awards and piety, tried to enter the same river twice, without being able to demonstrate something truly fresh and non-trivial, because in its final version the “Local”, turned in its cinematic perspective, in contrast to the memorable “Three Graves ...”, is not to the actual present, not to the topical modernity, although it is only interesting in terms of the etherealistic and etherealistic, as it does not coincide with its originality in its post-constructionist and post-constructive style. However, “Local” is a film far from ideals and moments deceiving expectations so much that it is time to talk about the director’s failure and inability to cope with a really complex and ambiguous cinematic material, the letter of the literary source corresponding quite to Hollywood standards of reading.
Based on the novel of the same name by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Glendon Swarthout, transferred to the screen, however, not without forced transformations and changes in moral and ethical attitudes, “Local” Tommy Lee Jones in his ideological and plot-forming constructions skillfully flared up on the fertile soil of feminism, presenting himself as a Western in which men, and primarily the central protagonist Briggs performed by the director himself, in which the obvious features of the heroes-lones of Clint Easter’s film, one of James’s, a resolutely exploitative character from the heroine, who now experiences the role of John Kuhlain’s, one of the main character from the heroicist, who is a female producer. Passive, however, for the time being, for genre patterns also gradually surface on the film surface in their transparent obviousness. The director skillfully places accents in the picture so that “Local” turns into an anthem of women’s power over men, their strength and will, opposed to male cunning, viciousness and nearness. However, the path for the main characters initially seems doomed; having received the hard-won right to rebel against the prevailing rules and basic principles of existence in the Wild West, where women were hardly destined for a major role in the food chain, the heroine of Hilary Swank Mary B fully failed to realize it, the rebellion, although even such an attempt, unreal in its nadistoriness, deserves attention and complicity. In the purely male world, she will remain a stranger, coming from another time period, which is that the director, that the producer imprinted in the artistic structure of the tape too sharply, deliberately, in order to shade the tradition of the accompanying Briggs, in whose mouth the whole simple moral stuffing of the picture is mainly embedded, which is that there is no place more dangerous than the Wild West, that the place of a woman is not with a gun, but at the stove and that any way somehow ends with internal changes and existential conclusions that do not lead to a stupa and a dead end.
Definitely the main reference point for Tommy Lee Jones in the creation of “Local” was as “Unforgiven” Eastwood, deconstructing the genre of Western to the level of incriminating social statement in the direction of male cruelty and female long-suffering, and the tape of spaghetti plan, decorated with irony and rampant spectacular bloodletting, but in fact the film does not correspond to any of the above definitions, without having, perhaps, only almost all the features of the classic Western, except a dashing cowboy with the backs of a pure heroine, who sincerely survive the radiant. Smooth and restrained in directing, academic and sometimes dry, “Local” is not always impressive with psychologicalism and persuasiveness, and has not reached the level of the philosophical road parable of unforgiveness and redemption in the finale devoid of obvious catharsis and serious drama.
For the honored and many beloved actor Tommy Lee Jones, the unforgettable agent Kay from the comedy-fiction trilogy “Men in Black”, it is not the first time to take the director’s chair: the dramatic western “Local” is already Jones’ fourth work as the main director. If his first film in this role, “Old, Good Guys” (1995), shot for television, went unnoticed, then the two subsequent films “Three Graves” (2005) and “Evening Express Sunset Limited” turned out to be much more successful, maybe they did not become number one events in the years of their release, but critics warmly reacted to Jones’ films. And in 2014, Tommy Lee Jones again released his new film, which caused controversy. I must say that Jones releases his paintings as a director more and more often: judge for yourself, because between the first and second picture was a whole ten years, the third came out after five, and “Local” – four. I wonder when to expect a new one? It will still be watched because Tommy Lee Jones is loved and respected.
The film is based on a book by an American writer (if a Western, it is quite obvious that the author must be an American) Glendon Sworthout. The book was handled by absolute debutants Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley A. Oliver (the latter was the producer of Sunset Limited Evening Express), and Tommy Lee Jones himself helped them in this difficult matter. The film tells about the long journey of a girl named Mary B. Cuddy, who wants to transport crazy women to a shelter, and on the way finds an assistant in the person of a certain George Briggs, who is distinguished by an unpleasant disposition, self-love and profanity. Along the way, Mary B and Briggs have a relationship that goes a little further than a partner, but it will bring only misfortune. While Briggs will travel to the orphanage, he will face difficulties, with the unwillingness of people to help, but he will suddenly begin to change before his eyes, and after all, he could leave three crazy to the mercy of fate - it would be in his character.
Despite the drama that the film tried so carefully to play out, it feels quite difficult. With ordinary video sequences, questionable field shootings and weak dialogue, you can not immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the wild prairies during the newly emerging US independence. Sometimes I wanted to hear the sounds of shots, as it is inherent in the Western genre, but the whole action of the film is built around the difficult path, which, in the end, becomes very boring. The dull background and such music contribute to this even more. In this scenario, the option to raise the picture is a game of actors. But only in a few scenes you can feel the characters of Tommy Lee Jones (Briggs) and Hilary Swank (Mary B.), otherwise they also make up a rather dull picture. Even the accentuated hints of mental illness of the people of the wild west in no way play on the general perception. The film fell apart before our eyes and only occasionally attracted attention.
Tommy Lee Jones was amused with a plague face in white stained pajamas. He somehow managed to create an image of a changing person from bad to good, from coward to daredevil, but the lack of proper emotionality in dialogues and character explosions in individual scenes does not create a general picture of the hero Tommy Lee Jones. Hilary Swank played in the same vein as Tommy Lee Jones - in some places something succeeded, but mostly read a poorly thought out, raw image that left more questions than answers. The disparate ensemble consisted of three actresses who played crazy - Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto and Sonya Richter. Playing such roles is difficult and the girls did not cope one iota. In small episodes, John Lithgow, James Spader, William Fichtner and Meryl Streep herself appear, but they are so few that it is impossible to say anything definitive about them. One was consolation - flashed Hayley Steinfeld, superbly played in another western "Iron Arm" and earned, despite her youth, even an Oscar nomination. But she flashed and quickly evaporated, remembered only by caustic phrases and walking barefoot.
The film, which probably wanted to strike for awards, due to its rarely touched genre characteristics and a message to a deep road drama, but was a failure and did not produce the desired effect, despite the cluster of stars. A very dreary and monotonous western, which seems overly stretched and with an incomprehensible ending, also "distinguished" by the weak play of the actors. With all due respect to Tommy Lee Jones, but:
3 out of 10
Directing Tommy Lee Jones has attracted attention since the release of the drama Three Graves. It is interesting, directing, primarily because it is not a mirror image of the acting career of Tommy Lee Jones, because all three directorial projects that I happened to see are focused entirely in the independent direction of cinema.
The thought of this film is far from empty, the history of the film throws back in the days of the Wild West, or rather in the difficult times of this period, and the viewer is given the opportunity to get acquainted with the usual battles with red-skinned or drunken fights in saloons. There is no harvest, women are going crazy.
Three such poor people force the local chaplain to send them back to their native land, only there is no one to accompany them. The most courageous is an unmarried woman who, along with a former soldier who accidentally met, takes her passengers to a better place. As director Tommy Lee Jones does not disdain hard shots, whether it is a baby thrown into a burial pit, or playing with a needle through the veins.
The tone of the film is quite tough, despite the presence of the usual for all characters Tommy Lee Jones skeptical humor. In this film, he also tries to demonstrate all sorts of prejudices of the time, whether they were objective or not, and how much they changed someone’s life. It’s a good script and idea to shorten the film by a quarter – a different perception would probably be for the better.
The origins of this film originate, of course, with John Ford with his iconic “Searches”, while repeating Ron Howard’s “The Last Raid” (which also starred Tommy Lee Jones). Tired of the life of an elderly and sophisticated man is forced by chance to transport three mentally ill women. Of course, without sexual exploitation will not do. The theme of the inadmissibility of any kind of sexual exploitation and equal rights is not the first year in the trend. No surprises. However, the meaning of this story certainly shows us such a grim reality that women simply have no choice but to run into a saving corner of insanity, so as not to give their nature to a ruthless era. The boring sage, who was performed by Tommy Lee Jones with his meaningful conversations, will bring the viewer closer to enlightenment. But is it necessary?
On visual delights, there is no need to talk here. The space, moderated by director Tommy Lee Jones, is compressed to a punching distance. This claustrophobia occurs even when scenes unfold across wide plains. Than opposing the freedom-loving sweep of Clint Eastwood, in whose films there is plenty of fresh air. And if you listen to the conversations themselves, will they not seem to you the most elegant variation on the topic, which Tommy Lee has repeatedly tried in “No Place for Old Men”, “Sunset Limited”, “Three Funerals?” I just saw it. All this search for common sense turned out to be the most ordinary dud. A significant charismatic veteran signs off in his real weakness and inability to form a serious narrative. The apotheosis here is a small participation of Meryl Streep, so actively replaying that once again puts all her unofficial titles of “great actress” in a very big doubt. So without ever changing my respect for Tommy Lee Jones, I can’t help but give a higher rating.
3 out of 10
1855. Difficult times of mastering the Wild West, which is cruel and inhospitable to all who first found themselves here - among the boundless, going somewhere into the shaky distance of the desert of nauseating yellow sands and suffocating in its hot prairie. Foreign, dangerous lands, where the aliens have ordered the entrance, and if it comes out, then only forward with their feet, and their own. . They are perhaps not so many, and most of them are cowboys, hunters of Indian heads, the Indians themselves, zealously defending their territorial limits, and just outcasts looking for their place in the sun.
Mary B is one of the rare breeds of women in the Wild West who will walk into Uncle Tom's burning hut, and the horse will stop at a jump, and make something else. Her life is as loose and rough as the land that belongs to her and which she is forced to cultivate in agony. Becoming a savior and just a friend to a cowboy no less dragged by life than herself, named George Briggs, Mary B agrees to help him transfer three mentally ill women from Nebraska to Iowa for a digestible reward. However, from the very beginning, the journey does not promise to be cloudless. . .
The film-participant of the competition program of the recently deadened Cannes Film Festival, “Local” 2014 became the fourth full-length directorial work of the famous American actor Tommy Lee Jones and the third in a row his appeal to such an original American genre of cinema as a western after the debut television film “Old, Good Guys” in 1995 and the cult “Three Graves of Melquiades Estrada”, which in 2005 became one of the main Cannes triumphants. It seems that Tommy Lee Jones, with his new picture, which received a rather contradictory reaction from both the public and critics at the exit and left Cannes unsalted breadwinner, without awards and piety, tried to enter the same river twice, failing to demonstrate something truly fresh and non-trivial, for in its final version the “Local” turned in its cinematic perspective, in contrast to the ever-memorable “Three Graves...”, not to the actual present, not to the evil modernity, although it is only interesting in terms of the “spiritual” that it does not coincide with its originality and post-constructualism, but rather with its post-constructualisticalism, as well-constructed, in its originality, but also in its originality, as well as a post-constructed and exemplexist and exemplative style. However, “Local” is a film far from ideals and moments deceiving expectations so much that it is time to talk about the director’s failure and inability to cope with a really complex and ambiguous cinematic material, the letter of the literary source corresponds quite to Hollywood standards of reading.
Based on the novel of the same name by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Glendon Swarthout, transferred to the screen, however, not without forced transformations and changes in moral and ethical attitudes, Tommy Lee Jones’s “Local” in his ideological and plot-forming constructions is skillfully flared on the fertile soil of feminism, presenting himself as a Western in which men, and primarily the central protagonist Briggs performed by the director himself, in which the obvious features of single heroes Clint Easter are manifested, the character of the film, the Besssy from the pastor, who is a strong character of James, who is a character from the film, who is worthy of the pastor from the heroic character of the pastor, who is a heroic character of the pastor, who is a heroic character of the heroic character, who is a heroic character of the pastor, who is a heroic character of the heroic character of the actress, who is a heroic character of the heroic character of the actress, who is a heroic character, who is a heroic character, who is a heroic character of Passive, however, for the time being, for genre patterns also gradually surface on the film surface in their transparent obviousness. The director skillfully places accents in the film so that “Local” turns into an anthem of women’s power over men, their strength and will, opposed to male deceit, viciousness and nearness. However, the path for the main characters initially seems doomed; having received the hard-won right to rebel against the prevailing rules and basic principles of existence in the Wild West, where women were hardly destined for a major role in the food chain, the heroine of Hilary Swank Mary B fully failed to realize it, the rebellion, although even such an attempt, unreal in its nadistoriness, deserves attention and complicity. In the purely male world, she will remain a stranger, coming from another time period, which is that the director, that the producer imprinted in the artistic structure of the tape too sharply, deliberately, in order to shade the tradition of the accompanying Briggs, in whose mouth the whole simple moral stuffing of the picture is mainly embedded, which is that there is no place more dangerous than the Wild West, that the place of a woman is not with a gun, but at the stove and that any way somehow ends with internal changes and existential conclusions that do not lead to a stupa and a dead end.
Definitely the main reference point for Tommy Lee Jones in the creation of “Local” was as “Unforgiven” Eastwood, deconstructing the genre of Western to the level of incriminating social statement in the direction of male cruelty and female long-suffering, and the tape of spaghetti plan, decorated with irony and rampant spectacular bloodletting, but in fact the film does not correspond to any of the above definitions, without having, perhaps, only almost all the features of a classic Western, except a dashing cowboy with backstries of a pure heroine, who are genuinely exterminist and a radiant of survival. Smooth and restrained in directing, academic and sometimes dry, “Local” is not always impressive with psychologism and persuasiveness, and has not reached the level of the philosophical road parable of unforgiveness and redemption in the finale devoid of obvious catharsis and serious drama.