Local Hero (1983, Bill Forsyth) (Patreon)

63/100

Second viewing, last seen ca. 1990-91. I vaguely recall feeling disappointed back then, and can now see why: There's a weird battle raging here between "quirky feel-good comedy" and "melancholy art film," with neither one emerging victorious. Much of that dissonance appeals to me, but some of it, particularly in the home stretch, just seems badly muddled. It's as if Forsyth genuinely couldn't decide what he wanted to do, and so tried a little of everything. Part of me admires the perversity (especially in the context of this oft-annoying sub-genre), but I can't honestly say that I come away fully satisfied. 

Still, what glorious surface charm! As someone who's lived his entire life in cities with a population of at least 200,000 (and 40 of those years in two of America's dozen most populous), I'm usually put off by tales of sleek urbanites who get unexpectedly seduced by rustic splendor and simplicity. Forsyth doesn't entirely avoid that cliché, but he tweaks it beautifully by having Ferness' inhabitants positively jump at the opportunity to sell their ancestral land for an enormous profit. Denis Lawson's wily performance as man-of-most-trades Gordon Urquhart sets and then controls the tone—he's clear-eyed and pragmatic, but also soulful and randy (strictly with his wife, though she and Mac also share a lovely mutual yearning that's never acted upon), deftly avoiding stereotype at both ends of the eccentric-cynic continuum. Peter Riegert does an appealing slow thaw (up to a point that I'll address below), and it was pleasantly startling to revisit baby-faced Peter Capaldi acting in gentle dork mode, absent even a hint of Malcolm Tucker's caustic contempt. Even the cutesy running gags are executed with impressive panache: It's mildly amusing the first two times that Mac nearly gets run down by Ricky on his motorbike, but I laughed aloud the third time, when we see Ricky whiz by first, seemingly solo, and then Mac, who'd been obscured by some large object, stroll through the motorbike's path. (Happer being negged against his will by a rogue therapist whose approach involves emotional abuse is likewise consistently funny, though it doesn't seem to belong in this movie.) 

Just about the time that both we and Mac have fallen for Ferness, though, something very peculiar happens. Forsyth has set up a clear conflict, not exactly groundbreaking, but effective: It's Mac's job to make the deal that'll displace this community and destroy its gorgeous natural beauty, and he no longer wants to do it, even though the locals very much do want that. How can this be resolved to everyone's satisfaction? Because there is really no respect in which Local Hero, up to this moment, has not behaved like the sort of movie that intends to wrap things up quite happily, after teasing us with some obstacles. And narrative orthodoxy demands that Mac, our protagonist, make some decision or take some action that solves the problem. That's not what happens. Instead, Gordon belatedly discovers that one especially eccentric fellow, Ben Knox (who we're presumably meant to assume is related to Knox Oil and Gas' founder), owns a key chunk of the land that Happer wants to buy. Efforts to persuade the lone holdout dominate the third act, and Mac's internal wrestling match just sorta disappears—he re-devotes himself to getting the job done, minutes after offering to swap places with Gordon and stay in Ferness forever. Then Happer arrives, talks to Ben offscreen, and emerges with a revised deal that'll preserve the village (making it home to a marine lab instead of a refinery), whereupon a clearly crestfallen Mac returns to Houston. The end. Well, save for the sound of a ringing Ferness pay phone that implies Mac's continuing ardor for the place, and perhaps his return.

Took some time and reflection to pinpoint why this seems frustratingly incoherent to me, rather than gratifyingly complex. On paper, Mac heading home, unfulfilled, is the sort of realistically downbeat ending that I tend to embrace...and it would work for me, I think, were he more actively involved in the final decision (as opposed to just standing around with everyone else, waiting for Happer to emerge from Ben's shack and bark some orders), or had he made a concerted effort to scuttle the deal, only to discover that nobody's willing to give up their windfall (which is where the plot seems to be headed around the time that Mac gets drunk and starts waxing lyrical about Ferness). What we actually gets feels oddly punitive, with a happy ending baldly contrived for every character excepting Mac. In order for that to land, Mac would need to have been uniquely foolish or misguided or self-destructive—he would have to, in some sense, "deserve" such a sad fate, since it's being inflicted upon him alone. Ultimately, though, Local Hero barely even seems to be about him, and so there's no catharsis in that ringing telephone as the screen goes black. Anything one could infer from it had already been established half an hour earlier, and then strangely ignored for a while. Enjoyable though Riegert's lightly sardonic air reliably is (going back to Boone in Animal House), I found myself wishing that Forsyth had ditched the whole smitten-foreigner angle and made Gordon Urquhart his primary focus, with Oldsen as Knox's liaison to allow for a bit of succumbin'. As is, the climactic shifts between jubilation and depression come across not as a wise observation about life's rich pageant, but as a filmmaker struggling to have it both ways.