Flickchart Road Trip: Minnesota
Welcome to the latest installment of Flickchart Road Trip, in which I’m starting in Los Angeles and “driving” across country, watching one movie from each state and posting about it once a week. The new movie I watch will go up against five movies from that state I’ve already seen, chosen from five distinct spots on my own Flickchart. Although I won’t tell you where the new movie actually lands in my chart (I don’t like to add new movies until I’ve had a month to think about them), I’ll let you know how it fared among the five I’ve chosen. Thanks for riding shotgun!
If you are practicing your Marge Gunderson accent in your head, you won’t find Fargo upon our arrival to Minnesota. Not yet, anyway. Fargo will be desperately needed when we arrive in North Dakota, a state where about seven other movies in the history of cinema have been set.
However, that doesn’t mean that people don’t talk like Marge in the great state of Minnesota. They do, sort of.
While in Minnesota I decided to track down another famous Minnesotan to his supposed hometown. That would be Garrison Keillor and the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”
If you aren’t familiar with this description of the town, or indeed with the town itself, you probably have never listened to the old-fashioned radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion, which plays on Saturday nights in most markets, and of which Keillor is host. It runs live from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Central Time from a theater in St. Paul, and features musical acts, sketch comedy, and the part that always interested me most as a kid, the news from Lake Wobegon segment on each show. Each week Keillor would tell a story about characters from the town he made up, characters who developed three glorious dimensions over years of appearing in his stories. The stories were — and I assume still are — a perfect mixture of poignant and hilarious. We had a collection of them on four audio tapes when I was a kid, and I listened to them to the point that I could almost recite them.
So how does one find a fictional town? It’s easy enough to do, if you know the town the fictional town was based on. Keillor says that he modeled Lake Wobegon on Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota, a town of 689 people (according to Wikipedia) that happens to be right on the border of the state I just left behind: Wisconsin. From Green Bay, my last stop, you just take WI-29 West, then I-94 West, then MN-95 North, and in just under five hours of driving you’re there. It is a very small town, but it’s not that far from Minneapolis, so it doesn’t really feel remote. The city is home to the first commercial sawmill on the St. Croix River, as well as a number of other 19th century landmarks listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I visited the sawmill in question, called Marine Mill, and made note of the historic Lutheran Church — because most of the characters in Garrison Keillor’s stories are Lutherans.
The city just to the southwest is a lot more hustling and bustling, with many people on the sidewalks working their various side hustles, especially if you are to believe Prince in his second and (so far) final feature film as director, Graffiti Bridge. This Minneapolis-set extravaganza — for want of a better word — was envisioned as kind of a sequel to his hit Purple Rain, but it totally failed to connect with audiences in Prince’s hometown … or anywhere else. The 1990 film has a dismal ranking of #24660 among Flickcharters.
What it’s about
The plot, such as it is, surrounds the rivalry between clubs in a Minneapolis location called the Seven Corners. Kid (Prince) — once just a performer, now a performer and co-owner of the club Glam Slam — must fend off the profit-seeking advances of his musical rival and Glam Slam co-owner, Morris Day (playing himself). Day wants total control of the Glam Slam, desiring to add it to a club war chest that already includes the popular club Pandemonium. Not only are they musical rivals, but they both have taken a shine to Aura (Ingrid Chavez), a poet and believer in God who composes her verses by the titular bridge just outside the city. Both Kid and Morris are deeply affected by Aura, but they want to use her spiritual good will for vastly different purposes. Will Kid get to save his club when other Seven Corners club owners, such as George Clinton, are giving in to Day’s greedy impulses to bribe the mayor into earning him more power and control? Will Aura be too good for this world?
How it uses the state
If you didn’t know that Prince was from Minnesota and sets his films there (except Under the Cherry Moon, which was set in France), you wouldn’t get much help from Graffiti Bridge. Zero reference is made to the city or state in which the action takes place. However, the titular bridge is based on a legendary landmark (since torn down) in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. The film was also shot in Minnesota, as the credits give a special thanks to “The City of Chanhassen, The City of Minneapolis, Minnesota Film Board and U.” That’s right, U as in you, the audience. Aww, Prince, you shouldn’t have.
What it’s up against
Before we get to my thoughts on the film, let’s duel it against five other Minnesota movies I’ve already seen, shall we? As you know if you’ve ever added a film to Flickchart using the “By Title” feature, the new movie goes up first against the movie in the exact middle of your rankings. The outcome of that duel determines whether it faces the film at the 75th percentile or the 25th percentile, and so on, until it reaches its exact right place. With five movies, that means at least two and as many as three duels. Here are the films Graffiti Bridge will battle:
1) A Simple Plan (1998, Sam Raimi). My Flickchart: #96/3562. Global: #1077. Just as my favorite Wisconsin film (David Lynch‘s The Straight Story) stood out like a sore thumb in its director’s catalogue, my favorite Minnesota film is, well, the second least likely Sam Raimi film (after the Kevin Costner baseball drama For Love of the Game). This wintry noir cum Shakespearean tragedy is one of the more satisfying thrillers about found money, and the way it changes the lives of ordinary people, to come along in the last couple decades. It showcases how little Raimi relies on crutches like gonzo effects, superheroes or the undead to be a highly effective craftsman. It also reminds us how capable a director of actors he can be, as Billy Bob Thornton was nominated for an Oscar as the dim-witted but morally pure Minnesota hick Jacob Mitchell. When Jacob, his brother Hank (Bill Paxton) and their friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) uncover a crashed plane and a bag of money in the Minnesota woods, the only thing harder to believe than the change in their personalities is the nearly comical manner in which they try to sabotage themselves. Bridget Fonda also excels as Hank’s wife, a Lady Macbeth type.
2) Young Adult (2011, Jason Reitman). My Flickchart: #1238/3562. Global: #2245. Juno would have fit a bit too snuggly next to my #1 Minnesota movie, so instead I took this other Jason Reitman-Diablo Cody collaboration set in Minnesota as my #2. However, there’s really a third collaborator to mention here, since Young Adult wouldn’t be nearly the acerbic portrait of an infantile thirtysomething who really doesn’t get it if it weren’t for Charlize Theron. Theron isn’t just there to wear Mavis Gary’s explosion of green and pink fashion, isn’t just a body on which to drape her pouts and frowns. Theron gives a naked, vanity-free performance as a truly unlikable character, a YA novel ghost writer who returns to her Mercury, Minnesota hometown to make a tacky play at her married and soon-to-be-father high school boyfriend (Patrick Wilson). Patton Oswalt adds to the discomfort as the guy who always liked Mavis but was beaten to the point of disability by high school jocks who thought he was gay. He gives her as close to a human character arc as she can get, but Mavis’ immense self-absorption is destined to leave her character thrillingly unresolved.
3) A Prairie Home Companion (2006, Robert Altman). My Flickchart: #2355/3562. Global: #3335. Given the affection for the variety show I put forward in the opening of this piece, it pains me to have ranked A Prairie Home Companion so low — a lot lower, in fact, than my typical third favorite movie from a given state. Maybe finding two Minnesota movies I liked less, and therefore elevating this to third, was my way to make it up to Garrison Keillor, as well as to Robert Altman in his final feature film. Maybe if this had felt like more of Keillor’s film, and less like Altman’s attempt to trot out a greatest hits collection of his collaborators to talk over each others’ dialogue, I’d like it better than I do. However, since Keillor is not really an actor per se, this focus was probably inevitable. What particularly bothered me — even though it ended up taking on metaphorical significance after Altman’s death — was the whole subplot about Virginia Madsen playing the supernatural figure of an angel, her presence haunting the Fitzgerald Theater (the St. Paul theater where the show really plays) as its new owners decide whether this type of variety show should fade into history. I’d have preferred straight realism here.
4) Grumpy Old Men (1993, Donald Petrie). My Flickchart: #2610/3562. Global: #2272. I was all set to christen Grumpy Old Men my #3 Minnesota movie when I discovered that my Flickchart duels have been particularly unkind to it, leaving it squarely in the bottom third of my rankings. Flickchart doesn’t lie, right? Sure, this curmudgeonly comedy will never live up to the career highs of its two formidable stars (Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau), but with those careers, that would be asking a lot. As both legends would be gone from us within eight years, Grumpy Old Men does provide a late-career glimpse at what made them such loveable fussbuckets, their vinegar quotient as high as ever. The two former friends and rival neighbors in Wabasha, Minnesota, develop a new rivalry over the beautiful, exuberant neighbor who moves in across the street (Ann-Margaret). They are also ice fishing enthusiasts, and what would a Flickchart Road Trip through Minnesota be without a little ice fishing?
5) Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999, Michael Parick Jann). My Flickchart: #3414/3562. Global: #2615. Just drop dead. This simply awful comedy has a strong (Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, Ellen Barkin) or at least famous (Denise Richards, Kirstie Alley) cast, all being put to strenuous use in service of one of those movies where beauty pageant contestants and their parents try to kill each other. In fact, numerous contestants from the fictional town of Mount Rose, Minnesota, are either accidentally or intentionally killed during the film’s running time. This kind of thing can be funny, sort of, but here it falls flat, and leaves the viewer feeling icky. Good satire tends to go to such extremes, but this is not good satire, and I don’t really understand why the film has developed a cult following in the years since its initial release. In fact, actress Allison Janney says that more people approach her asking questions about Drop Dead Gorgeous than about her Emmy-winning turn on The West Wing.
First duel: Graffiti Bridge vs. A Prairie Home Companion. This is truly a bridge too far for Graffiti Bridge. A Prairie Home Companion wins.
Second duel: Graffiti Bridge vs. Grumpy Old Men. Not a very grrreat duel, in the end. Grumpy Old Men wins.
Third duel: Graffiti Bridge vs. Drop Dead Gorgeous. Yeah, I really didn’t like Drop Dead Gorgeous. Graffiti Bridge wins.
Graffiti Bridge finishes fifth out of the six movies.
My thoughts
If it sounds like I had a difficult time writing a plot synopsis for Graffiti Bridge, you’re quite perceptive. It’s really — I mean, incredibly — hard to tell what’s going on from moment to moment, even though there isn’t very much going on at all. That’s how inept this movie is. It’s not like Purple Rain, its forbear, was a narrative masterwork, but at least it sort of had a clear plot that ran from start to finish. This film? Don’t even bother trying to figure it out.
All of the posturing of Prince and Morris Day — Prince deep and enigmatic, Day noisy and crass — wouldn’t matter all that much if the music held this movie together, as it does for Purple Rain. However, the music here is one of Prince’s worst collections of music, while Purple Rain represented possibly his best. The only “hit” to emerge from Graffiti Bridge, and that’s defining that word generously, is “Thieves in the Temple.” Even still, that’s a song you’re more likely to acknowledge in terms of “Oh yeah, that song, that one I used to hear in regular top 40 rotation around 1990,” than as anything close to a Prince classic. The Tevin Campbell song “Round and Round” was about that familiar/popular, and I guess Prince does deserve some credit for allowing other performers to share his spotlight.
Without music, what are we left with? Not much. Prince has never been much of an actor. In fact, it’s downright awkward how little he asks himself to do in any of these movies, so incapable is he of doing it. You might guffaw once or twice over the outrageous behavior of Morris Day and his real-life band The Time — in one scene, for example, they eat jalapeno peppers as some kind of a gang initiation rite. These two factions get a chance to menace each other through a handful of “sing-offs,” all of which take place on sets so flimsy that you really have to wonder why any of this was actually shot within the state of Minnesota.
The character of Aura is clearly meant to be some kind of religious symbol, to give the film an extra depth that is obviously lacking elsewhere, as well as a little touch of magic. (She references God, but her poetry isn’t quite so on-the-nose religious as that — it’s more spiritual in a Prince sense, with all the many uses of the letter U and the number 2). However, her character is ultimately so hard to pin down that it’s no more worth trying to figure out her plot function than the function of anything else that happens here.
Up next
Since it’s still the summer for a few more weeks, I think it’s time to go to a state fair. In fact, in heading to Iowa, I’ll also watch the 1945 musical State Fair, and see what’s changed in the last 68 years.