Ironweed

A film set in Albany, New York state. The year is 1938. The Depression is still on. Francis Phelan lives on the street. He has not been home for twenty-two years. The film opens with him working in a cemetery. Day labour; digging graves. He passes a grave there. His own son's. The baby died at thirteen days. He dropped him while carrying him. He left home after that day. From there the film lasts a few days. Helen is with him. She was a singer once; she trained at a conservatory. Now she is on the street and ill. The two sing in a bar. She goes up and the narrative shows the scene twice: as she hears it and as it is. Rudy is the third. He has cancer and makes a joke of it. They look for work in the city. At a scrapyard, in a church kitchen, on a lorry. Francis talks to the dead. The men he killed come. He hit a man with a stone during a strike; the man sits beside him and talks. The narrative does not build this as a ghost; the man is simply there. What the narrative is interested in is not poverty but a reckoning: its idea is that what Francis ran from was an accident rather than a crime, and that he could not accept it as an accident. At one point he goes home. His wife Annie is still in the same house. She takes him in. No fight, no accusation. He stays a night. Then he leaves. That is the film's hardest section. The narrative leaves the door open and he does not go in. The source is William Kennedy's novel; he wrote the screenplay himself. Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep were both nominated for Oscars. The images are dark and dirty. The narrative beautifies no scene. Héctor Babenco directed. Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Carroll Baker, Michael O'Keefe and Tom Waits are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1980s American drama and performance-centred film. Who it is not for: anyone looking for hope; the narrative is heavy, the tempo very slow, and there is consolation nowhere.