Cinema: Detour

BACK ROADS

Directed by Martin Ritt

Screenplay by Gary Devore

Back Roads is the kind of movie that no one actually needs: another retelling of a kind of boondock fairy tale everyone has heard too often. On the other hand, it could turn out to be a movie that quite a few people will want to go to once the word gets around that Sally Field is at her most winning in the leading role.

To dispense quickly with the story: Field is a tart-tempered tart with a gold-filled heart forced to hit the road, looking for the good life she imagines might exist in Los Angeles. What she is slow to realize is that it is right there beside her, in the person of a canvas-backed prizefighter (Tommy Lee Jones). He causes some trouble, but turns out to be useful and good-natured when new difficulties arise in the course of their odyssey together. And arise they do, with metronomic and lugubrious regularity, once a reel. If the pair get a few bucks ahead, someone is sure to rip them off, and probably do them some physical harm too.

That represents the movie's bow to realism. Its comic spirit is exercised mainly through repeated shots of Field running awkwardly down roads and railroad tracks in heels of perilous height. The variant on this gag is to have something or someone upend her in order to show her tight skirts stretching across her admittedly adorable bottom.

Ritt's strength has never been humor, but he does understand what Field's forte is, namely, a sort of plucky vulnerability. Even when she is talking tough and acting brazen, there is an openness in her smile, an irreducible innocence in her large round eyes, that disarms the crankiest spirit. She is ably supported by Tommy Lee Jones, doing another of his backwoods lunks. Familiarity has bred a certain agreeable expertise in him, a goofy nobility that wears well.

Whether or not performance is enough to overcome a script that is uninventively repetitive about these characters and the situations they encounter along the way is problematic. Ritt's direction is plodding when it is not obvious. It lacks the romantic lift that this film needs. Luckily, Field has the spunk and sass to redeem Back Roads just as she did Ritt's Norma Rae two years ago. He should never leave home without her.

—By Richard Schickel