MOVIE REVIEWS : Dreamer Who’s Down but Not Out in ‘Reno’

“South of Reno” (opening Friday at the AMC Century 14 and the Beverly Center Cineplex) is an engaging, humorous and finally wistful study of a young man caught up in inertia. It is also an amusing foray into the quirky lowlife of mangy roadside America where many people’s lives tend to be marginal at best.

Jeffrey Osterhage plays Martin, a railroad switchman with so much time on his hands that he throws nails and broken bottles onto the highway in the hope that a flat tire will provide him with someone to talk to. He lives in a ramshackle mobile home in a flyspeck of a desert community some 200 miles south of Reno and spends most of his time watching old movies on TV--never mind he gets only one channel or that the reception is so terrible that there’s a constant snowstorm on the tube. Is it any wonder that his wife Annette (Lisa Blount) is having an affair with a mechanic, the local macho man (Lewis Van Bergen)?

Martin is not merely a dreamer but also a self-deceiver. He tries to tell himself his wife isn’t two-timing him, yet he’s afraid that if he fulfills his dream of going to Reno with his pal Hector (Joe Phelan), Annette might leave him. (The mystery is why the soured Annette, unable to appreciate his visionary nature, hasn’t left him long ago.)

Yet Martin holds our attention and makes us care what happens to him, thanks to the steady inventiveness of Osterhage, director Mark Rezyka and co-writer T. L. Lankford. Martin is a naive romantic, yet he’s smarter and more sensitive than anyone around him. In his dogged way he actually does thrash against his fate.

There’s something appealing in Martin which makes it possible for anyone who has ever felt trapped to identify with him. The point “South of Reno” makes in such a winning, offhand way is how hard it is to know to what degree we make our own fate, or whether we in fact merely seal that fate when we try to struggle against it.

“South of Reno” (Times-rated: Mature), in which cinematographer Bernard Auroux makes desert landscapes and seedy roadside structures expressive of Martin’s despair, indulges in no heavy-duty symbolism or hand-wringing over the treachery of the American Dream. It aspires to be nothing more than a deft, brisk little vignette of endearingly funky Americana with an ironic O. Henry twist, and yet you may be surprised how well it sticks with you.