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Songcatcher received a Special Jury Prize at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival for “outstanding ensemble performance” by its cast, and Greenwald was nominated as Best Director. With that kind of send-off, this indie film should have been a shoo-in for success. Unfortunately, the film’s distributor was swallowed up by another company before the end of that year, and the new firm didn’t get behind the picture. (Almost the exact same thing happened to The Kill-Off, which earned Greenwald a Best Director nomination at Sundance a decade earlier, in 1990.)

I spent the better part of a year touting Songcatcher to anyone who would listen…and many who did told me how much they enjoyed the film. That didn’t surprise me; it’s a richly textured, highly entertaining picture with an array of wonderful performances.

Acclaimed British actress Janet McTeer, who earned an Oscar nomination for Tumbleweeds (1999), again plays an American character in this story of an independent-minded woman who teaches music at a New England conservatory. When she is passed over for a promotion, she decides to visit her sister, who is running a one-room schoolhouse in Appalachia. As a musicologist, she is overwhelmed by the amount of folk music that surrounds her, and makes it her business to notate these songs for posterity. In the process, the proper, straitlaced New Englander begins to soften as she gets to know these good-hearted backwoods people.

The supporting cast is first-rate, with Jane Adams as McTeer’s closeted sister, teenage Emmy Rossum as her niece, Aidan Quinn as a mountain man who becomes her love interest, and comedienne Pat Carroll as an earth-mother type who is a lynchpin in her quest to learn about indigenous folk music of the region.

Songcatcher combines the best qualities of a character study and a period piece, and enables us to share the sense of discovery that stimulates its main character. It’s an altogether remarkable film and a vivid piece of Americana.

123. SPRING FORWARD

(2000)

Directed by Tom Gilroy

Screenplay by Tom Gilroy

Actors:

NED BEATTY

LIEV SCHREIBER

CAMPBELL SCOTT

IAN HART

PERI GILPIN

BILL RAYMOND

CATHERINE KELLNER

HALLEE HIRSH

Ned Beatty has appeared in scores of movies since he made his unforgettable debut in 1972’s Deliverance, including such heavy hitters as Nashville, All the President’s Men, Superman, and Network (which earned him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor), but when I met him at the Independent Spirit Awards in 2006 and told him how much I love Spring Forward (1999), he seemed genuinely pleased. He told me that it meant a lot to him, too, adding that he and costar Liev Schreiber stayed in touch and hoped to work together again.

I was happy to get that reaction because it confirmed my belief that Spring Forward was a labor of love. The first feature film written and directed by New York–based actor Tom Gilroy, it earned strong reviews and some attention on the film festival circuit, though its quiet nature guaranteed that it wasn’t destined to be a mass-audience favorite. Yet actors Beatty and Schreiber recognized something special in Gilroy’s screenplay—just as viewers lucky enough to have seen it have come away richer for the experience.

The story takes place over the course of four seasons. Murph (Beatty) works for the parks department in a suburban Connecticut town. Paul (Schreiber), who’s just served time for armed robbery, is assigned to help him as part of a program to rehabilitate ex-convicts. The two men couldn’t be more different, yet over the course of a year their relationship grows and deepens. We learn about their backgrounds, their failings, and their hopes. Murph becomes a surrogate father for Paul, who acquires wisdom from the experiences he’s shared with the older man. And, as it turns out, Paul has something to offer Murph as well. (I’m deliberately being vague about all of this, as I don’t want to give away too much.)

Spring Forward is a character study based almost entirely on conversation, but the