Movie Review : ‘Miles From Home’ Far From Midwest Reality

“Miles From Home” (Royal) supposedly takes place in a stretch of Iowa farm country, a wide, still flatland where the wind shivers the trees at night. But, beautiful as it sometimes is, it’s not the Midwest any of us have seen or lived in. It’s a transplanted heartland made of bits and scraps of old movies and rock songs. A Mythwest, with ghostly echoes of Springsteen, Dylan and Bob Seger floating over the parched cornfields, a place where Bonnie and Clyde once raced by, roaring across the Badlands to the days of heaven.

This is a decent-hearted, well-intentioned, extremely well-acted movie, a film you’d like to get behind. It expresses concern for the average American, lost in the maw of an economic crisis, uprooted from the American Dream. But “Miles From Home” loses its subject in a field of waving archetypes. The movie suffers from closet heroics. It muddles up its portrait of a callous economy with a half-infatuated look at instinctual rebellion: thoughtless movie adolescence on a wild toot.

The central characters are two brothers (Richard Gere and Kevin Anderson) who have made a mess of their farm and are now being foreclosed by their icy-hearted old schoolmate whose father runs the bank. Rather than turn the farm over to him, the brothers burn it down. Then they skip town and, in short order, become folk heroes, racing around in heisted or secondhand cars, outfoxing cops, granting interviews to Rolling Stone, and even trying one aborted bank holdup.

These Roberts brothers are a study in contrasts. The elder, Frank (Gere), is an impulsive, bitter hothead, waving guns, swilling booze and touching off all kinds of psychic and natural fires. The younger, Terry (Kevin Anderson), quivers with sensitivity, staring at Frank with wide, wet, disapproving eyes, but going along on all of his crazy stunts.

Gere, as usual, gives Frank a smoldering, pent-up intensity, though he overplays his big leave-taking scene. And Anderson is a good, wary foil. But there’s something screwy about the film’s chronology. The Roberts brothers were youngsters in 1959, when Khrushchev visited their father’s then-booming farm--which we see in a sepia idyll of a prologue, with Brian Dennehy as Dad Roberts. That should make them about 35 and 40. Yet they act 25--a couple of blue-jeaned Adonis-Peter Pans who never married, never raised families, don’t have girlfriends when the movie opens, and are curiously isolated from everybody. This kind of alienation seems more urban than provincial, more Southern than Midwestern.

Writer Chris Gerolmo, raised in New York, doesn’t show a sense of the social mechanics of small Midwestern towns or cities. This odd male-bonded couple--who strongly suggest the warring brothers in plays like “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “True West” and “Orphans” and movies like “Hud”--are plopped down into the middle of a dimly perceived backdrop full of waving corn, dumb movie cops, strong, adoring women and rotten bankers.

Anderson and director Gary Sinise, who did “Orphans” together on stage, are veterans of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater. So are several other cast members, including Laurie Metcalf, terrific in a bit as a cynical stripper, and John Malkovich, who turns up in a stiff, lacquered-looking wig, playing a Rolling Stone reporter. Malkovich is good, but his reporter seems oddly nasty, unsympathetic and judgmental--something most interviewers try to hide.

Yet, despite this truly excellent cast and the Iowa locations, “Miles From Home” shows little real feel for the area. The landscape is foggy with symbolism, and one scene--with a fat, wicked-eyed farmer whipping his prize ox to death at a grim, joyless county fair--gets its milieu and people almost completely wrong. Like a car-crash thriller or a teen sex comedy, it’s a movie derived not from life or experience, but from other movies (and from one record album, Bruce Springsteen’s stark, hauntingly pessimistic “Nebraska”). Though the performances and direction give the film a veneer of sensitivity--Sinise is a wonderful director of actors--it remains a veneer.

Maybe Sinise and Gerolmo are a bad match. “Miles From Home” might have been better without these fine, hyper-real, vigorously detailed performances; done as a consciously overblown movie like “At Close Range,” full of gaudy landscape shots and lyricized violence. Sinise stylizes it in a mistier, more delicate way, as if he were mixing up “Days of Heaven” with Altman’s “Thieves Like Us.”

His vistas seem pinched, and a kind of smoky reverie keeps blowing through the shots. At times you want to clear your eyes and head. Only Judith Ivey in one of her typically remarkable jobs, as a trailer-camp slattern, really blows the smoke away. She makes this movie breathe. Suddenly, as the superb Ivey rolls out a cracked, tired, lusty voice and peeks above a frowzy dress, you can feel a connection to the landscape, the people. You can sense their miseries, squalor, hopes; you can see the flat road, the blank horizons and every single dream that never panned out.