Fantastic Mr. Fox (***3/4)

IMDB link

viewed 1/2/10 at Ritz Bourse

Sweet Land (***)

? Suspicion and confusion greet a German mail-order bride (Elizabeth Reaser) who arrives at the end of World War I in a Minnesota farm community. Her nationality, combined with her lack of English skills, delays the wedding.

+ This is a quiet, subtle movie that’s partly about a young woman adapting to a new setting while not speaking the language, partly about a young couple’s halting courtship, and partly about what it might have been like to live in that time and place. I can’t think of another film that shows the process of learning language so well. The heroine knows no English at first (but for one comic phrase), and we watch, bit by bit, as she becomes more conversant. Reaser has to do a lot without speaking much, and she should garner some attention with her performance. The movie is beautifully shot on location in the stark Minnesota landscape.

- I’m a big fan of subtlety, but this might be too minimalist for my taste. Unless I missed it, you never really learn what led the main character to emigrate or why she became a socialist, for example. The film’s flashback structure adds little. And I thought it was a little unnatural how much the other characters speak to someone they know only speaks German.

= *** I found this story an absorbing collection of mostly small moments, but it might bore some people.