Sunshine State (**)
review by Jon Waterman

Writer/Director John Sayles presents us with an ensemble piece about two women in two similar, near-by communities and how they cope with the changes they are brought to face.  One, Desiree (played by Angela Bassett), comes back to visit her mother after being sent away at fifteen for getting pregnant.  The other, Marly (played by Edie Falco), came back to work at her father’s motel/restaurant because his vision had deteriorated.
 
The two women experience parallel after parallel, but their paths never become perpendicular (meaning, they don’t interact—that I remember).  Both were low-rung entertainers.  Both dread what they have waiting for them at home.  Both want to make things right.  Neither have the drive to make things right.  Both have to fight off developers (led by the poor man’s Kevin Kline, Timothy Hutton) that want to change their respective communities.
 
My only problem.  I didn’t care.  Oh, and I wasn’t too keen on the acting.  This movie has won a lot of praise for its superb acting.  I can’t see it.  It seemed forced or bland most of the time.  Maybe it’s because I didn’t care.  Maybe it’s because the film started with some bad acting led by Alan King and the rest of the Greek Chorus golf players and I never recovered from it.  I didn’t like the golfing prophets.  The movie would have flowed just as well without.  It seemed an obvious attempt to make the film look smarter than it needed to look.  The film is plenty smart on its own.  I just didn’t happen to care.
 
Another thing the film didn’t really need is all the white people.  Didn’t matter to me.  I found the battle for the black neighborhood to be much more intriguing than the fight to save the motel or the struggle to put on the “Buccaneer Days” festival.  Perhaps this is because businesses are bought and sold everyday and society learns to adapt quickly.  However, buying and selling of neighborhoods can easily strike a chord with an audience, because it’s easier to imagine your livelihood at stake.  Plus the back stories of the characters were more interesting, too.
 
What really pulled me away was that there were too many people and the little things, the subplots took too long to develop.  Small details were left out in the open like a season-ending cliffhanger and a half hour later it would be brought up again in the film.  Generally not a good idea in a film.  Other ensemble pieces, like “Magnolia,” work because you don’t know where the characters are going to go next, not because you want to stick around to find out some little detail about their past.
 
The film is good.  It makes good points and the general themes and messages will be poignant for decades to come.  However, it was boring and I only cared about half of it.

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