Also this issue:

Killing Time
Hit men, convincing and otherwise, dominate Road to Perdition.
-Cindy Fuchs

Sayles Event
With Sunshine State, John Sayles explores the commodification of history.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks

Continuing Shorts

New Shorts

July 12-18, 2002

movies

Sun poisoning: Marley (Edie Falco) is unhappy in paradise.

Sunshine State

by Sam Adams

Sunshine StateWritten and directed by John Sayles A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz East

It’s hard to believe there are any John Sayles fans who don’t agree with his politics. A devoted social chronicler and champion of so-called ordinary people, Sayles is more artisan than artist, which is to say his movies tend to be about their subjects rather than inside them. And yet, they still matter, if more socially than cinematically. It’s hard to miss the point that Sunshine State, like the more polished Lone Star, is about history, since characters keep referring to it, if not constantly saying the word. Sayles isn’t above underlining his points, as when a character dressed in historical-reenacter’s garb tells another, “You can’t live in the past.” (Get it?) Covering the same ground as Lone Star but without a genre to bounce off, Sunshine State is often shrill instead of clever. There’s no perspective-altering twist at the end, just a slice of poetic justice, aided and abetted by a self-empowering director-god.

Set on a small island off the Florida coast, Sunshine State takes a dim view of tourism and development -- the pair of golfers (including a sardonic Alan King) who serve as the movie's Greek chorus are, the end credits reveal, surnamed Silver and Cash -- which isn't particularly surprising, as positions go. Not that there's a lot of moral high ground to be had, but Sayles caricatures the developers and chamber of commerce toadies without much mercy or interest. Mary Steenburgen's desperate, frazzled booster, the inventor of an ersatz holiday called "Buccaneer Days," exists mainly to have comic points scored off her, as does her bumbling husband (Gordon Clapp), a bank employee who's embezzling to feed his gambling habit, and whose repeatedly interrupted suicide attempts are played for laughs. (Hasn't Clapp been the butt of enough such jokes on NYPD Blue?) Sayles excels at imagining the interrelations between and within communities, but apparently some people deserve more imagination than others.

What Sunshine State does best is expand on the tension between the ugly reality of history and the myths we create to cover it up. Tom Wright's college football sensation, once the pride of all-black Lincoln Beach, returns as a car salesman with a busted knee and a few dark secrets to hide, the neighborhood he came from diluted by desegregation to a shadow of its former self. The graves of its former residents lie in a corner of a gated community, collecting stray gold balls, while visitors have to pass through security checkpoints to get there. Delrona is practically void of spring breakers and retirees, but in a sense it seems everyone there is retired from their former glory, rarely chasing it, but just accepting that such things lie in the past. That sense of complacency dogs Sunshine State as well, which pays lip service to a call to arms but mostly just preaches to the choir.