MOVIE REVIEW : A ‘DESERT BLOOM’ IN THE OMINOUS ‘50S

“Desert Bloom” (at selected theaters) does what you never thought possible: make you feel nostalgic about being that most trying age--13--in a decade that was scarcely the best of times for this country, the 1950s, when we faced war in Korea, the advent of the McCarthy witch hunts and, most ominous of all, the start of the nuclear arms race.

But for most Americans it was a period of innocence, and that’s what debuting writer-director Eugene Corr captures so irresistibly in his exceptionally accurate piece of Americana. Even as the Cold War heated up, there was good reason for most of us to be optimistic about the future. And if, like the one in “Desert Bloom,” yours was not a particularly happy family, parents were far more inclined to try to stick together, rightly or wrongly, making the best of it for themselves and their children.

Corr, who wrote the original story with Linda Remy, deftly parallels the coming of age of his bright, dark-haired heroine (terrific newcomer Annabeth Gish) and the dawning of the nuclear age. Her stepfather (Jon Voight), driven to drink by nightmares of his World War II experiences, runs a seedy gas station on the outskirts of Las Vegas, soon to witness its first above-ground A-bomb test at the nearby government bombing and gunnery range.

Corr knows and loves his people thoroughly. He’s given his actors much to work with--and they’ve given much of themselves in return. Worn, lean and slightly lame, Voight’s Jack Chismore has a war hero’s pride and the defensiveness of the self-educated man, a man who’s always catching himself in a bigoted expression a beat too late. He has an all-consuming need to protect his devoted, pretty wife Lily (JoBeth Williams) and their three young daughters, but he couldn’t quite tell you exactly from what. He’s no more capable of curbing the venting of his drunken rages upon Gish’s increasingly defiant Rose than he is of apologizing afterward. Voight’s portrait of the loving yet destructive alcoholic father is heartbreakingly on target.

Rose tells us that “mother saw only what she wanted to see,” but Williams shows us a woman not so much kidding herself (even as she shoves a whisky bottle behind her Fiesta pitcher) but one who consciously preaches positive thinking as the best way of dealing with her problems. Lily may have a passion for cliched homilies--”Promises don’t put butter on the bread,” “A girl who’s all wrapped up in herself makes a pretty small package”--but underneath she’s strong and loving, a determined survivor.

Then there’s Ellen Barkin’s Starr, the young aunt of a teen-age girl’s dreams, the sexy, flashy, good-natured good-time gal, all pink and perfume and rayon satin--and all too desperate to land a guy--but just the woman to reassure and guide an adoring niece across the thorny thresholds of adolescence. (Both Lily and Starr, in their different ways, are emphatically pre-women’s lib creatures, unquestioning in their belief that a man must be at the center of their universe.)

Rounding out the Chismores’ lives are the boy next door (Jay D. Underwood), apparently Rose’s first beau, and Allen Garfield as their neighbor--concerned about Rose, and the only person around alarmed about the aftereffects of that imminent A-bomb test.

There’s a credit in the film’s end crawl for “The Atomic Cafe,” a 1982 documentary on the impact of the dawning of the atomic age upon the popular consciousness. In place of that documentary’s ruinous facetiousness, “Desert Bloom” (rated PG for moments of intense emotional conflict) views with sobering perspective the naivete that almost all Americans shared. Similarly, art director Lawrence Miller and costume designer Hilary Rosenfeld recall time and place flawlessly while resisting satirizing or burlesquing lower-middle-class tastes. (You could, however, wish Corr had resisted telling us that Starr, once settled down, devoted herself to turning out paintings on black velvet.)

Rose remembers the past with compassion and forgiveness--and with a rare understanding both of human limitations and the extraordinary feats that people can nevertheless accomplish. In Gish’s luminous portrayal of Rose we witness the blossoming of a girl clearly superior to her family but, as heard in her words of reminiscence as the narrator, one who grew up to be a woman too wise and loving to condescend to her relatives.