Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

One of America’s foremost pastimes is living in the past, which is why every autumn “The Great Gatsby” gets re-assigned to kids all over the country, and which is why the legend of the 1916 New York Giants re-surfaced to give context to the Cleveland Indians, and is why no one thinks they make movies or music like they used to. Sure, sure, we garble about the future too, that mystical future, but even the future, as our nation’s current President can tell you, is really just an attempt to raise the past, the whimsical past where everything was perfect, until we truly re-visit it, of course, and are re-reminded it wasn’t all so grand, as this passage in Murray Sperber’s illusion shattering chronicle of college football, “Onward Victory”, I am currently reading goes to show... “When the Rose Bowl signed up the Big Ten for a long-term pact, shutting out southern and southwestern schools, one sportswriter noted that the deal assisted the California land developers on and behind the bowl committee because ‘more real estate can be sold, and at higher prices, to people from the Middle West than to yokels from Dixie.’” Oh.

“Sunshine State” (2002) is set in the present but significantly stained by the past. The opening shot, a pirate ship on fire, makes you think it is the past until the camera pulls back to show you a few flashing lights atop a cop car. The pirate ship is part of Buccaneer Days, a commercial attempt for the Florida community of Delrona Beach to re-visit its past, which is far more murky, of course, than some lamebrain festival would ever let you know, as their neighboring black community of Lincoln Beach goes to show, which once was wondrous and alive but now is rundown and left hanging, refuting the notion that in the wake of the civil rights movement everything was hunky dory for Black America. Marly Temple (Edie Falco), meanwhile, is stuck managing a Delrona motel & restaurant that is part of the family, though a corporation called Exley Plantations (another nod to the fraught past) wants to snap it up, to turn the community into some sort of pseudo-paradise, and Marly’s ex-husband Steve (Richard Edson) has his own grand vision for a waterpark pseudo-paradise that he hopes to fund by borrowing from Marly if she cuts a deal.

Sayles is not really known as a comic filmmaker, but of all the movies of his I have seen, and I have seen quite a few, this is the funniest moment he has put on screen, one that could stand up to any fine satirist, when Steve tries to convince Marly to help him out and Marly curtly cuts him down.

Steve: “You know why you’re stuck running that flophouse? Because you got no vision.”
Marly: “I can’t believe you think I’d loan you money after what you put me through.”
Steve: “That’s all over and done with, Marley. You can’t-”

But wait! Before we actually say the hilarious capping line let us acknowledge that it’s a line that has been employed thousands of millions times. And that it’s a line that has been employed thousands of millions of times is what makes it funny given the context, and that the context relates to his costuming because he is on duty as a re-enactor at an old Civil War fort. The esteemed Roger Ebert once noted, characters wearing funny hats are never as funny as characters who don’t know they are wearing funny hats. And Steve...well, Steve doesn’t know his costume is funny given what he says. And Edson, who, as the immortal Parking Garage Attendant in “Ferris Buller’s Day Off”, told Cameron Frye to relax with a facial expression of amusing incredulity, accentuates what he says with a twisted variation of that same facial expression that in this case becomes the emblem of a comical delusion of a man who thinks he is moving forward without realizing he is actually stuck in cement. He says...

“You can’t live in the past.”

Dissecting a Scene from Sunshine State

Typically our scene dissections here at Cinema Romantico center on visuals, a series of screenshots employed as a means to scrutinize the chosen scene to its core. John Sayles, however, is not the most visually progressive director around, championed more as a screenwriter and a storyteller, made great by his ability to draw on history, politics and psychology to implement multitudes of characters and weave extraordinary tapestries that are at once emotionally and socially revealing, like his signature, to our eye, film, 2002’s “Sunshine State.”

That is not to say “Sunshine State” is simply of the point and shoot variety. Sayles can and does employ visuals to enhance his narrative, such as the opening shot of a pirate ship on fire, one blurring past and present so that you don’t quite know where you are, which effectively suggests the film to come, one where the past always informs the present and the present will inevitably suggest the future. That last point is evinced in the closing shot, not to be revealed, but which for all of the grand Sayles-ian dialogue, which we will get to momentarily and which can sometimes suggest the stage more than the screen, could only have worked on that screen.

Still, the words in “Sunshine State” bear so much color and weight. That goes for all the characters in and around the white enclave of Delrona Beach and the black enclave of Lincoln Beach, each of which is being threatened by the ominously named Exley Plantation Estates, blatantly evoking a particularly sordid chapter of America’s past, which wants to re-brand the shoreline, and whose principals speak in war room-ish patter (that dialogue!). They employ a landscape architect named Jack Meadows (Timothy Hutton) who is confronted one morning by Marly Temple (Edie Falco), proprietor of a shabby motel and restaurant which Exley yearns to buy and tear down. Later, after this confrontation, Marly re-encounters Jack at a watering hole and they have a back and forth, which is glorious, quintessential Sayles, one of my favorite bits of writing in any movie ever. And while I could break this whole thing down line by line, well, for the most part, I'd simply like to let those words speak for themselves.

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Marly, tossing back shots at the bar in the middle of the afternoon, notices Jack drinking across the way.

So she gets up from her bar stool and walks right over to him.

Marly: "Trying to imagine what it'd be like without all us crackers here?"

Jack: "You're everywhere."

Marly: "Small island."

Then, mirroring her no b.s. personality, she takes a chair and sits down right across from him without asking permission.

Jack: "Listen, I didn't mean to be intrusive the other morning. I thought they'd already contacted you about it."

Marly: "Don't worry about it. There are days when I imagine the whole thing blown away in a hurricane."

That "thing" being her motel and restaurant, where she theoretically should be even though she's here instead, downing shots and making small-cum-big talk in the middle of the day.

Jack: "Must be a lot of work being a hotelier."

Marly: "Motelier. And we got the restaurant. Lord, I hated working there when I was a kid."

Jack: "And now?"

Marly: "I've got three girls working for me who hate it as much as I do."

Jack: "So why do you keep-"

Marly: "Poetic justice."

Her reply is an example of the actor, Falco, putting her own stamp on the material, running roughshod right over the end of Hutton's line and giving "poetic justice" the air of a former punchline that now is too true, and has been too true for too long, to be funny anymore.

Marly: "What are you drinking?"

Jack: "Draft. How about you?"

Marly: "Shots. Tequila."

Jack: "Woah."

Marly: "I figure, you're gonna drink, why fuck around?"

This always make me think of the time Bill Murray told David Letterman that a person drank moonshine when they wanted to get drunk but didn't want to put in the effort.

Marly: "You're from up north?"

Jack: "Mmmmm. They tell me, everybody on this coast is from somewhere else."

Marly: "Not me. Six generations on this sandpile. At least."

Jack: "That's impressive."
Marly: "You go back that far your people were either planters, slaves or fugitives."
Jack: "And yours were?"
Marly: "I don't know what they were running from but this is where they stopped."
Jack: "I'm from Newport. Rhode Island."
Marly: "With the yachts and the big estates?"
Jack: "My dad took care of the lawns."

On that line, Hutton effuses pride and Falco effuses satisfaction at his pride.

Jack: "So you never left the island?"
Marly: "Sure, I left. You're looking at a former Weeki Watchi Girl."
Jack: "A what?
Marly: "Over near Homosassa there's this show, been running since the late forties."
Jack: "You acted?"
Marly: "Performed. You do it underwater. Here, let's have a contest."

And here, Sayles does show rather than tell, in a sense, by having Marly scoot forward in her chair and, again without asking permission, put her hand to Jack's nose to force him to hold his breath as a demonstration of what a Weeki Watchi Girl has to do.

Then she takes his hand and puts it on her nose, forcing him to force her to hold her breath.

In unspoken terms, a hold-your-breath contest emerges, one which Jack quickly loses.

Jack: "You win."
Marly: "I could hold it twice as long even I hadn't been drinking."
Jack: "I'm impressed."
Marly: "The important thing is to keep that smile on your face."

And though you don't know it at the time, that line is foreshadowing the movie's most affecting moment a little bit later, when Marly, drunker than she is now, on a golf course with Jack undercover of night, lays back in the grass and repeats what she just said, "the important thing is to keep that smile on your face", with the fatalistic augmentation of "even if you're drowning", a heartbreaking summation of her whole life.

Jack: "How long did you work there?"
Marly: "Three years. And then I met my ex. He had this band. Skeeter Meter."
Jack: "Like a rock band?"
Marly: "They were big around Tampa. You ever heard The Allman Brothers? Lynyrd Skynyrd? Then you've heard Skeeter Meter. He was Greek. And good looking. His daddy was a sponge diver before all the sponges died out."
Jack: "What did they die of?"

As he asks this, she picks up her shot.

Marly: "Boredom. Laying under some rocks, soaking up whatever rolls over you. It's almost as bad as Delrona Beach."
Jack: "There's a lot of changes happening."

Jack: "Things might pick up." And as he says this, she tosses back the shot.

Marly: "Don't hold your breath."