Off the Map (2005)

Off the Map avoids conventional drama (hardly any event leads to an outcome you could expect) but the lean, sharp dialogue and superb performances make this movie a rich, human comedy. A young girl named Bo, living in the New Mexico desert, rebels against her bohemian parents by reading Forbes magazine and applying for credit cards. Her father Charley (Sam Elliott, Tombstone) has sunk deep into a paralyzing depression; her resilient, industrious mother Arlene (Joan Allen, The Upside of Anger) alternates between gently supporting Charley and railing against his zombie-like state. Into this off-balance family comes a tax auditor (Jim True-Frost, Singles), who--after being stung by a bee and lapsing into a sudden fever--becomes an accidental catalyst for change. In her movie debut as Bo, Valentina de Angelis gives a wonderful performance, head and shoulders above most actors her age. Campbell Scott's direction, as with his first film Big Night, is warm but not sappy; he has a gift for letting a story wander without it ever getting lost. The New Mexico landscape glows in the sun and helps give Off the Map a quiet but mysterious vision of life. --Bret Fetzer Amazon.com

Brilliantly Wonderful for the Heart!!!

Depression hits and it is such huge work trying to turn it all around and along comes this magic gift...WOW!

I found "Off The Map" so heart warmingly brilliant that I sat and watched it over again. I wanted to stay within the "given" within it all for-ever. I have never felt so loved and supported by a movie before.

To the Cast...THANK YOU!
To the ScreenPlay Writer ... Thank You!
To the Producer...Thank You!
To the Director ...Thank You!

I would love more wonderful gifts of this magnificence to made for the viewing, it is such a magically healing movie!

Zebaulla

August 29, 2008

Enchanting, mesmerizing, spiritually intense

The gentle rhythm of the movie is a gesture that penetrates the mysterious glow of nature with intense wisdom. I cannot recommend this movie enough. Director Campbell Scott accentuates the poetry of nature through a stark depiction of a land stripped of human adulteration. The movie is an adaptation of Joan Ackerman's play that centers on the isolated Groden family, Arlene (Joan Allen), Charley (Sam Elliott), and their precocious daughter Bo (Valentina de Angelis) who live in a state of depressed civilization, an abode that is under a spell of an involuted economy where money is but an afterthought and nature the true protagonist. The Groden family has no phone, no running water, no tv, and no neighbors aside from coyotes and bears, both of which end up dead in a ritual of nature that will have you transcend the usual materialist self-serving appropriation of the symbiotic aggregates of life. Survival is more of an internal issue for the family rather than an economic one. Civilization seems to have been dismissed in favor of a love for their landscape and the appeal of a spiritual dynamism that has yet to be "put on the map" by the commercial prints of the "world".
One day a hapless IRS agent, William Gibbs (Jim True-Frost), arrives at their house for an auditing, issued by the government, for the Grodens had not filed in seven years. A Massachusetts native who has transfer to Albaquerque and adopted a new profession, which has buried him deeper into the symptoms that distinguish a cog in the wheel of our civilized machine. The agent will become enchanted with the lifestyle, the landscape and the bewitching simplicity that nestles the Grodens everyday existence. He will end up staying with the family sucked by the aridity of cares that seem to barter with his ease of consciousness and habitual indifference.
The New Mexico desert offers a contemplative universe to the IRS agent who, betaken by Arlene's beauty and the mystical flux of her spiritual transparency, becomes invested by an artistic bent that will alleviate the economic strains the Grodens are about to suffer due to the penalties they incur for neglect to file their taxes. The mesmerism and the intimacy of their simplicity is fraught with an evocative sterility that has beset the head of the household, Charlie, who suffers a deep-rooted depression that will haunt him for half a year. This is the most interesting aspect of the movie. Charlie will detain his energy and become insignificant to the family he had been an ingenious resourceful maverick to. He was the intelligence which had allowed for such a dissident lifestyle to work, while Arlene was the soul that fitted such a naked world. The arrival of the IRS agent signals a movement away from the grieving for the void that surrounds Charlie and a return to celebrate the beauty that this same void elicits.
Bo is an insouciant, eloquent, witty, imaginative, young and dazzling virago that prowls about the story as years removed she piques her memory to disinter the events of the summer when her dad was suffering from such a depression. She narrates from different angles devolving into her return to her family's home at the conclusion of the movie, the setting of her reminiscing journey. The narrative does not offer a rush of action, but it does deliberate and exhilarate through the languid force of a natural mysteriousness, all aglow, illusive and compelling, abounding in its raw powers and contagion, we are absorbed by a dramatization where consciousness seems to be but the infusion, the curving point where the horizon swallows our vision as it dissipates: the vanishing point where humans become but the best interpretive agency that draws boundaries between life and death unaware of its transcendental beauty.
Watch it and own it so that you may be delighted by repeated viewings. The layers of meanings are prodigious and profound. This movie succeeds in animating what great novels do in several hundred pages. It gives life to the dynamism of nature, lyrically startles and emotionally it reaches for a wasteland where desires are anchored in a barren immense.
July 29, 2008

Pass the popcorn...and the prozac.

I wish Campbell Scott had realized how off-putting the "precocious" child actress in this film was. Every glance, every spoken word of her dialogue just made me cringe. I can't believe her forced performance didn't bother others more.

The plusses? Joan Allen is TERRIFIC. The photography is fantastic.

But the "BO" character? Man, if I lived around a precocious-every-word-of-dialogue-is-just-so-pert-and-perky-from-my-12-year-old-lips...I'd be catatonic and depressed like Sam Elliott, too. Pass the popcorn and the prozac! Skip this film. June 23, 2008

Great for NM lovers, artists, and folks longing to see a movie with no enemies

A beautiful movie set in northern New Mexico in a simple time. A family lives in the NM high desert rural land reminiscent of "the 60s" style living. The story is occasionally narrated through the eyes of the daughter, now adult. The acting is superb. It is movie that deals with depression, eocnomic hardship, challenge, and family issues without judgment, blame, or violence. An outsider joins the family and becomes involved in their lives in an integral way. It is refreshing to see a movie where there are no bad guys. Off the Map offers a transformative theme and is a wonder to see. The natural beauty adds to its depth. It is hard to imagine coming away from this movie without feeling sad yet edified about life. I heartily thank my friend and author M. Quest who recommended this to me! March 8, 2008

Off the Map

Beautifully shot and rich in emotion, "Map" is a film that quietly gets under your skin. Elliott is a revelation as Charley, a man carrying a nameless despair that's struck him dumb, while Allen is fabulous (no surprise) as philosophical bedrock Arlene. Young de Angelis also shines in a demanding juvenile role. A story about life's infinite possibilities and finding sustenance when and where you least expect it, Scott's movie is a quirky, heartwarming delight. Go off the map to see it. July 23, 2007

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