MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Winter People’: Cold Comfort

“The Winter People,” which opens the AFI/Fest tonight and plays in selected theaters beginning Friday, has so many arresting characters and facets that when it begins to go completely haywire it’s like watching someone you’ve become rather fond of come unglued.

Carol Sobieski’s screenplay, adapted from the carefully wrought novel of North Carolina regional novelist John Ehle, sets a father and young daughter from more citified Pennsylvania down in the middle of an isolated Smoky Mountains community, mid-Depression time. Wayland Jackson (Kurt Russell) is a decent, gentle, humorous man with patience enough to make clocks, which happens to be his trade. Recently widowered and only now coming out of it, he is the devoted father to a ferocious, outspoken 10-year old daughter, Paula (splendid newcomer Amelia Burnette).

When their car gets stuck in a country stream, father and daughter stumble down through misty woods onto a remote mountain compound belonging to Collie Wright (Kelly McGillis) a notably suspicious woman, and her beautiful, 6-month-old son, Jonathan.

Collie, it seems, is a pridefully unmarried mother, although she has kept the father’s identity secret. (It doesn’t take vast detective work to ferret out the man however; if you remember the Hatfields and the McCoys or Romeo and Juliet you might have a clue.)

Having this baby has alienated Collie from her mother, but not her patriarchal father (Lloyd Bridges) or her three brothers: the weak, guilt-ridden storekeeper Gudger (Lanny Flaherty), stocky blacksmith Milton (David Dwyer), or Young (Don Michael Paul), obviously the youngest, a handsome, traveling, all-purpose hell-raiser.

Almost instantly, Jackson and Paula are taken up by the lonely Collie, although the specter of the baby’s father, who may return at any moment, hangs over their growing involvement. Jackson, whom Collie quarters in an out-building, is introduced to this close-knit mountain community and even persuades the Wright clan to back the building of an enormous clock tower in the center of town.

Sobieski’s dialogue is respectful of Ehle’s beautifully written North Carolina talk, expanding it at times inventively. But, excepting nicely played scenes between Jackson, Collie and Paula, the tone that director Ted Kotcheff has set begins to seems ludicrous.

Don Michael Paul has been encouraged to play the lusty Young like every amateur auditioning for the role of the Rainmaker in a bus-and-truck touring company. The baby’s father looks and acts like a slathering, backwoods Rasputin. It makes it impossible to imagine Collie with him more than once, and theirs was supposed to be a love affair that went on for more than two years. The suspicion rises that this off-beat property may be condemned.

It’s a feeling that gets stronger with our first introduction to the Campbell clan, rivals to the Wrights and headed by elder Drury Campbell (Mitchell Ryan). They’re first seen robbing and vandalizing the Jackson’s stranded car like a pack of howling, bearded degenerates. Granted that these hunters and trappers are nearly barbaric in the novel; they still cannot be played like the North Carolina branch of Faulkner’s vicious, inbred Snopes family, or the film and its relationships are in deep trouble.

Ehle has written with the utmost precision, neatly delineating country people and their beautiful, oppressive surroundings with loving attention. It’s important that the Campbell and Wright patriarchs be imposing, nuanced figures. Kotcheff slurps effects onto his canvas with strokes broad enough to cover a barn.

And what, in heaven’s name, attracted Kurt Russell to a role where he could be upstaged by a 10-year-old, by an imitation Rainmaker or by a raving backwoods madman?)

The melodrama does plays itself out with an uncommon number of unexpected twists. However, Collie’s extraordinary decision near the close of the story snaps what credulity we may still be hanging onto. It’s an essentially literary device that may hold up better on a page than on a screen. Or better on any page than on this screen.

Collie’s action is like an inversion of the famous Faulkner story in “Knight’s Gambit,” which became the poignant film “Tomorrow” and may--still--contain one of Robert Duvall’s greatest performances. It centers around a lovingly raised child taken over by a brutish, vicious family. Because of the way the Campbells have been drawn here, Collie’s act, difficult enough to understand under any circumstances, becomes absolutely unthinkable.

Finally, in a last indignity, the film makers graft a sunshine-through-the-tears ending onto Ehle’s stoic, entirely fitting conclusion, a horse-trading session between the patriarchs which conveys continuity, birthright and dynasty. (Writer Sobieski cannot be entirely removed from responsibility here, since she was also the supervising producer, under the principal producer, Robert Solo.)

“The Winter People” (rated PG-13 for some of its brutality and rough language) is nevertheless a handsomely realized production. Its production designer Ron Foreman has made details like Gudger’s store realistic but never quaint; the work of cinematographer Francois Protat (“The Hitchhiker,” “Joshua Then and Now”) is exquisite and subdued without calling attention it itself, as is the succinct work of editor Thom Noble.

And given the improbable demands of her part, McGillis makes a heroic Collie, although the notion of her wild unbridled passion for the baby’s ruttish father seems to fall a little short of, say, Cathy’s for Heathcliff. For my money, the movie’s most intriguing performance is by the young, matter-of-fact Amelia Burnette who, in the freezing cold, manages lines like “I can’t move my fingers” without a hint of whining. Atta girl.