Cinema: Nodding Off

• Share

CROSS CREEK Directed by Martin Ritt Screenplay by Dalene Young

In 1928 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a frustrated newspaper writer, left the cold North and set up residence in the lush remoteness of central Florida. The therapy was successful. She found herself; she found a pleasant local fellow whom she later married; she discovered a passel of good friends in the cracker families living around the creek bend; and out of her experiences she wrote the novel that made her famous, The Yearling, and later her memoir, Cross Creek.

Old-fashioned Hollywood weepies demanded that the audience surrender to the prejudices of gender: that women were delicate, noble creatures, emotional yearlings, easy prey for the stronger, predatory male. Cross Creek is an inspirational weepie, asking the viewer to nod off with it into a dream of American rural purity. There, a backwoods shack just has to house a community of decent souls, and poverty is God's way of saying "Trust to your own resources," and folks' closeness to the land makes them more sensitive to the changing seasons of the heart. These propositions may be true, but they need not be dramatized with the moist sentiment that sticks to this movie like Everglades humidity.

Good performances, especially by Rip Torn and Dana Hill, play against the sweetness and come close to expressing the wrenching loyalties of familial love. Peter Coyote, as Rawlings' future husband, exudes steely authority from behind his gentle smile and bow tie—a humanized George Will. But Mary Steenburgen, an actress of eaglet resourcefulness, looks both too frail and too stubborn to bring Rawlings to life. One wishes Cross Creek well; one wishes even more that it were better. —By Richard Corliss