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Dilate the litterbug's skit and get "the garbage heap of history," Arthur Penn finds out in a most bleak comedy. Arlo Guthrie as himself, lanky, squinting, shrugging, shaggy Pierrot and genial bystander in his own tale. The lefty veteran running the coffee club sizes him up, before coming on to him: "You're not so unusual... We used to do that, all of us in the movement." Woody Guthrie (Joseph Boley) is the Old Guard expiring on a hospital bed, mute but still smiling at Pete Seeger's vroom-vroom razzing during "The Car-Car Song." Alternative values to replace corrupt ones, no better site for a fresh start than the deconsecrated church where the married dropouts (James Broderick, Patricia Quinn) establish a commune. Lunch counters and motorcycle races to sustain the dream, the Thanksgiving spirit for an informal family. "Grace be to us for bein' here to dig it, because we're beautiful!" The pin to the balloon comes from the recovering junkie (Michael McClanathan), "a lot of promises have been made around here." The whole Counterculture megillah of fuzzy troubadours, sniffling groupies, hollering sergeants, maimed soldiers and blind judges, viewed by Penn with sympathy and a creeping sense of doom. A vanful of trash is "the biggest crime of the last years," Officer Obie is on the case. The blowhard playacting as ringleader and the irritable Earth Mother make dubious parents for a bewildered generation, the country's musicality is pervasive but frequently dissonant. Draft-dodging slapstick, the middle finger behind the peace sign, rollicking-unkempt-melancholy collages. The delusional party that refuses to end as celebration collapses into elegy, "Songs to Aging Children Come." Romero has his own collective of dreamers to analyze in Knightriders. With Geoff Outlaw, Lee Hays, Shelley Plimpton, Tina Chen, Seth Allen, and M. Emmet Walsh.
--- Fernando F. Croce |