Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [94]
Director Mark Moskowitz takes another risk by making himself an integral part of the movie. This has worked well for others (like the poster boy for personal filmmaking, Michael Moore), but it can also backfire if we don’t care for the person on-screen, or if he seems to intrude on the material.
In this case, filmmaker and film are completely intertwined. Moskowitz, who makes political-campaign TV commercials for a living, is an avid, lifelong reader. One day, while rearranging the books on the shelves of his New England home, he comes upon a novel called The Stones of Summer, which he read when it was new in the early 1970s and he was a teenager. He had trouble getting through it then, but after revisiting it he becomes convinced that it is a masterpiece, a profound, evocative book about its times. Like any devoted bibliophile he checks to see what else Dow Mossman has written and finds, to his surprise, that this was his only published novel. What’s more, he can’t find out anything about the author—even if he’s still alive.
To disappear from the public eye in the Internet era isn’t easy, so Moskowitz undertakes a quest, not only to find Mossman, if he can, but to figure out how and why such a talented writer fell off the map, and why his book wasn’t more celebrated. But beyond that well-defined goal, he decides to explore the very nature of reading, and why we feel so connected to certain books we encounter over the course of our lives.
If you love books, chances are you won’t mind the fact that Moskowitz meanders far and wide, not only interviewing people directly involved with The Stones of Summer and leading literary lights but old friends and new acquaintances he makes along the road—book critics, editors, authors, and fellow readers—all of whom are happy to relate their thoughts about life and literature.
Does the filmmaker ever track down Dow Mossman? I’m reluctant to tell you, although the film is less a mystery/suspense tale than a meditation on reading and writing. All I know is that I reveled in every moment of Stone Reader because, like Moskowitz, I’ve been in love with books since childhood, and there are very few films that celebrate that special relationship.
130. SWEET LAND
(2005)
Directed by Ali Selim
Screenplay by Ali Selim
Based on the story A Gravestone Made of Wheat by Will Weaver
Actors:
ELIZABETH REASER
TIM GUINEE
ALAN CUMMING
JOHN HEARD
ALEX KINGSTON
NED BEATTY
LOIS SMITH
ROBERT HOGAN
PATRICK HEUSINGER
STEPHEN PELINSKI
PAUL SAND
JODIE MARKELL
KAREN LANDRY
I love watching a film I know nothing about and having the sense of making a discovery. That’s how I felt when I saw Sweet Land, which has gone on to win rave reviews and film festival honors. It’s the work of a first-generation American named Ali Selim, who expanded a short story into a beautifully nuanced movie about a German mail-order bride who shows up in rural Minnesota in the days following World War I, only to find herself ostracized by her future husband’s community, and even the local priest. Not only is the Norwegian populace a tight-knit, clannish group, but anti-German sentiments are still strong in the wake of the armistice. How will this newcomer ever fit in, and how will her husband-to-be ever reconcile his own feelings and the pressure being brought to bear on him?
Sweet Land is a film of subtlety and silence as much as dialogue and exposition. Much is told with a glance or a gesture, and the performances of leading lady Elizabeth Reaser as Inge, leading man Tim Guinee as Olaf, and such fine actors as Alan Cumming, John Heard, and Ned Beatty are exemplary. You really feel as if you’re experiencing this story with them as Reaser stubbornly refuses to give up on her tiny stake in the American dream.
Writer-director