Flickchart Road Trip: New Hampshire
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!
I’ve spent a lot more time off the coast of New Hampshire than on its mainland. For five summers in the early- to mid-1990s, I worked at a rustic island resort called Star Island, which you reach by taking an hour ferry ride from the dock in Portsmouth, just north of the Massachusetts border. Star is the most publicly accessible of the islands that make up the Isles of Shoals, with the others devoted to lighthouses, marine laboratories, and a private residence that sells lobster rolls to boaters in the harbor. Star Island is a conference center that hosts visitors for a week at a time in a glorious old hotel and a handful of outlying cottages, and about a hundred college-aged kids perform all the jobs that keep the island running. For eight summers I was one of the guests, and for five summers after that I was one of college kids. Both experiences played a big role in shaping who I am today.
So, now you know who to blame.
Last summer, on a visit back east, I took my family to the place I called home in the summer months from 1992 to 1996, making for my own first visit since 1999. However, that was only three hours on one afternoon in the midst of a busy trip — barely a tease. I figured I should take my current opportunity to at least stay overnight. The thing is, the way to stay overnight at Star is to be affiliated with one of the conferences. When I worked there, there was one conference per week, and that was it. I don’t have time on this trip to do anything for a whole week. Nowadays, though, there are mid-week and weekend conferences, so I hopped the ferry on Friday to take part in … A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is described as “a pagan retreat during the summer solstice.”
Interesting.
I attended a few of the events and had a few conversations with a few people, but I mostly took advantage of my time on island to rest my derriere in the rocking chairs on the porch of the grand old Oceanic Hotel. After all the time I’ve spent here, I know just which spot gets the most ocean breeze.
Here’s what the place looks like:
Star Island was not the only thing about my visit to New Hampshire that spoke to my experiences with the state. I also spent a dozen weekends over the summers of my youth at various friends’ lake houses, which means I was quite familiar with the setting of my New Hampshire movie: Mark Rydell‘s On Golden Pond, a 1981 nominee for best picture that actually won Oscars for both of its leads. The film ranked #1496 globally on Flickchart is one of those movies that was always on The Movie Channel right when my family first got cable 30 years ago, but I never caught it — probably because the subject matter isn’t so interesting for a 10-year-old. Now that I’m nearly a 40-year-old, I’m finally making up for it.
What it’s about
Retired university professor Norman Thayer (Henry Fonda) and his wife Ethel (Katharine Hepburn) have returned for another season at their New Hampshire summer house on a body of water called Golden Pond, just in time for Norman’s 80th birthday. Arriving from California to celebrate the milestone birthday is their daughter Chelsea (Jane Fonda), her new boyfriend Bill (Dabney Coleman) and Bill’s teenage son from a previous marriage, Billy (Doug McKeon). Whether they’ll really be welcome is another matter. Although Ethel is an old softie, Norman’s cantankerous nature tends to alienate him from both new acquaintances and people he’s known for years — especially his daughter. Complicating his mood is the fact that old age is finally starting to catch up to the new octogenarian, who is beginning to forget things and fail to recognize people. This is especially problematic considering how much time Norman spends behind the wheel of a motorboat.
How it uses the state
Like The Stepford Wives in Connecticut, On Golden Pond indicates where it takes place more in relationship to another place (New York City there, Boston here) than in and of itself. At one point Ethel says she met a couple who are “up from Boston.” Boston is also where their daughter Chelsea rented her car before driving up. Not that this is particularly convincing or relevant evidence, but the film does use the loon as a recurring symbol, and there’s a ski resort in Lincoln, New Hampshire called Loon Mountain.
What it’s up against
Before we get to my thoughts on the film, let’s duel it against five other New Hampshire 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 On Golden Pond will battle:
1) To Die For (1995, Gus Van Sant). My Flickchart: #745/3545. Global: #1698. It’s too bad Gus Van Sant hasn’t made more movies that don’t go to one extreme or the other, either too inscrutable (Last Days) or too mainstream (Finding Forrester). To Die For is one such film, and it’s a lurid delight. The film was based on a novel, which was in turn based on the real story of Pamela Smart, a Derry, NH high school media coordinator who plotted to kill her husband with her 15-year-old lover, a student at the school. Nicole Kidman is the perfect mixture of campy and sexy in the Smart role, here changed to a wannabe news anchor who starts an outreach program at the fictional Little Hope high school in order to find a candidate to bump off her husband (Matt Dillon). Joaquin Phoenix is the baby-faced but punked-out teenager who might just do the dirty deed.
2) What About Bob? (1991, Frank Oz). My Flickchart: #772/3545. Global: #1228. Remember all that talk about my experience with New Hampshire’s lakes? Lake Winnepesaukee was one of them, and that’s where high-strung New York psychiatrist Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss) and his family are supposed to be spending a relaxing vacation in What About Bob? Bob Wiley (Bill Murray), an oblivious phobic and Marvin’s patient, has other ideas. What’s truly infuriating to Marvin, though, is that Bob’s presence on his vacation — objectively an intrusion and a violation of proper patient conduct — is welcomed as a charming diversion by everyone but Marvin. Dreyfuss says it best in the movie’s most sublime moment, spitting the phrase “Get out of the car!” at Bob with such frustrated apoplexy that the words are almost unintelligible.
3) Lolita (1962, Stanley Kubrick). My Flickchart: #1054/3545. Global: #355. Who knew New Hampshire was the pedophilia capital of the U.S.? First it was a teacher type bedding a student in To Die For, now it’s one of modern lit’s classic tales of a man and his underage lover with Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel. To give you some indication how closely matched my New Hampshire movies are, I thought this would be my top-ranked movie from this state, when in fact it ranked third among the movies I wanted to use. A veteran of both the novel and Adrian Lyne‘s 1997 version (starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain) when I saw this, I found Kubrick’s take to have the most black humor — which is most certainly a compliment. The fictitious town of Ramsdale, New Hampshire is where the wonderfully named college professor Humbert Humbert (James Mason) catches his fatal first glimpse of Dolores Haze (Sue Lyon), a.k.a. Lolita.
4) Eight Crazy Nights (2002, Seth Kearsley). My Flickchart: #2106/3545. Global: #8502. Adam Sandler is a New Hampshah boy (though he likes the New York Yankees, which always annoys me). A couple of his films are set in the state, but I decided to go with the animated Hanukkah movie, just for the novelty of it. You’d be surprised to learn that Eight Crazy Nights is actually pretty entertaining, as far as mildly crass animated movies that were inspired by popular Weekend Update songs on Saturday Night Live go. The multiple voices Sandler does end up being the most fun, as his impersonation of an old woman perfectly matches the character design and doesn’t just sound like himself doing a lazy old woman voice. A couple of the original songs are also pretty successful. It’s not the long-awaited arrival of the first great Hanukkah movie, but you don’t have to be a Sandler fan to get some joy out of it.
5) Jumanji (1995, Joe Johnston). My Flickchart: #3148/3545. Global: #1534. When I was younger I thought it was clever to replace a word in the title of a movie, or even part of a word, with the word “bad” to indicate my dislike for it. So for a long time I referred to Jumanji as “Ju-bad-ji.” A film clearly encouraged into existence by the success of Jurassic Park, Jumanji struck me as a collection of somewhat effective special effects sequences tied together by a poor script and a lot of Robin Williams yelling and acting the fool. That’s probably a bit uncharitable to this certainly harmless film, but then again, I didn’t love Jurassic Park as much as most people did either. One noteworthy element for me personally is that it was shot in Keene, New Hamsphire (seen above), which I know pretty well because it was the hometown of a good friend.
First duel: On Golden Pond vs. Lolita. Thank goodness we’re not voting on which romantic relationship — between a middle-aged man and a teenager or an old married couple — is more wholesome. Lolita wins.
Second duel: On Golden Pond vs. Eight Crazy Nights. I’d be the crazy one if I denied Hepburn and Fonda here. On Golden Pond wins.
On Golden Pond finishes fourth out of the six movies.
My thoughts
Try as they might to be timeless, most movies definitely have a different impact depending on whether you see them when they first came out, or 30 years later. Not only are some of the cinematic techniques out of fashion, possibly to the point of being quaint, but the viewer watching three decades later loses some of the zeitgeist impact the film had in its original release. I suspect these are among the reasons I found On Golden Pond far less moving than the Academy voters who awarded it three Oscars, and far more melodramatic.
At the time it came out, On Golden Pond certainly spoke to people as a profound meditation on aging, as it featured two great American stars (Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn) clearly showing a decline in the vitality that had defined them for decades on screen. In fact, Hepburn seems considerably older than her 74 years — one might think that this was the performance that was responsible, in and of itself, for the exaggerated Hepburn impersonations we know and laugh at, with the trademark quavering speech patterns and patrician vocal mannerisms. The fact that she’s so big here seems also to be an indication of a declining ability to modulate her performance — though it should be noted that she did win an Oscar.
Hepburn would live for 20 more years, though. It’s Fonda who didn’t act again after this film, dying not long after he won his Oscar — which certainly only increased the level of poignancy people already associated with this movie. Since I don’t have the immediate real-world circumstances informing my perspective, I feel less inclined to excuse some of the things I found heavy-handed about this movie: the oppressively sentimental score, Jane Fonda’s overacting, the repeated use of the title (characters speak the words “on Golden Pond” at least three times by my count). However, some parts of the movie would be problematic regardless of the circumstances. For example, one of Fonda’s biggest, most emotional speeches comes not 30 minutes into the movie, when we’re only just starting to learn that he’s losing some of his faculties. It’s an odd structural choice indeed with nearly 90 minutes remaining before the end credits.
However, I certainly don’t want negativity to be your primary takeaway of what I thought of this film. As I said earlier, I have plenty of experience boating on lakes in New Hampshire — riding over to the marina to get supplies, paddling a canoe through water that’s as clear and calm as a glass surface, that kind of thing. Seeing this on screen filled me with a wistfulness that sustained itself throughout the film. Though I might pick a little bit at the performances of the younger Fonda and Hepburn, I actually found Henry Fonda to be pretty astonishing. It’s a tricky role, too, because his character is written as inexplicably obstinate — especially toward his daughter, who addresses him by his first name as a rather obvious symbol of their estrangement. (It’s not the only obvious symbol, as the meaning behind a dead loon they fish out of the pond could not be any more obvious.) However, Fonda really overcomes some of the limitations in the broad way his character is written — an unlikely comment to make about Ernest Thompson’s script, an adaptation of his own play, which also won an Oscar.
Up next
We’re heading to Maine, the home of Stephen King, which means it’s my duty to watch one of a handful of his film adaptations I haven’t seen. Even though it’s not yet the dog days of summer, I’m opting for the possessed dog movie Cujo. In Flickchart terms, its bark will be going up against its bite.