Sayles’ women

John Sayles’ movies aren’t always artistically successful—Men With Guns was conspicuously flawed—but they’re always worth seeing, and when Sayles is on top of his game he’s not to be missed. Sunshine State is Sayles at his best.

This makes an interesting companion piece to two of his earlier movies. Like 1999’s Limbo, which took place in Alaska, and Lone Star (1996, Texas), the state in which Sunshine State takes place is almost as much a character in the story as the people on screen. Here the setting is Florida’s Plantation Key and the (fictitious) communities of Lincoln City and Del Rona Beach. The theme that runs through all of the movie’s plot threads is the tension between past and present, not only the past of the characters but the past of the place, and the quandary of how to move into the future without either carrying useless baggage or discarding some piece of a valuable heritage.

The metaphor of real estate development is ever-present. In the opening scene Alan King, as a character named Murray Silver, holds forth on the golf course on the virtues of development—“nature on a leash,” he calls it—and Murray comes back at intervals like a Greek chorus, never part of the action but always, it seems, having some cogent comment on it as he schmoozes with his foursome on the fairway.

At the center of Sayles’ script are three women, all of whom have deeply ambivalent feelings about their hometown. Desiree Perry (Angela Bassett) is back for a visit to her mother (Mary Alice), the first since her father died in 1984 and only the second since she was sent away, pregnant and disgraced, at the age of 15; “My Mama and Daddy were so good,” she says, “that I had to be perfect just to be good enough.”

Marly Temple (Edie Falco), meanwhile, runs the restaurant and motel that were her father’s pride and joy but is for her only a source of frustration and disgruntlement. For Marly, the thought of selling out to the developers seems a godsend—especially when she meets the handsome landscape architect (Timothy Hutton) who may be working the land over—except for her melancholy guilt over disposing of her blind father’s patrimony. And Francine Pickney (Mary Steenburgen) is the harried organizer of the town’s Buccaneer Days, a forlorn, rinky-dink little shindig designed to build civic pride, but which seems to have more in common with Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean than with real Florida history. “People just don’t realize what an effort it is, trying to build a tradition,” she whimpers, as her husband Earl (Gordon Clapp) massages her aching feet. She calls Earl her “rock,” little suspecting that his gambling addiction is driving him to attempt suicide—so far, at least, without success.

Sunshine State is more leisurely and contemplative, less plot-driven than either Limbo or Lone Star. It’s as if Sayles had decided to pass on the idea of a complex plot this time in favor of just leaning back and looking at his characters from a number of different angles. The complexity of Sunshine State is psychological, even social, rather than narrative; nothing much happens, but there’s always something going on. At one of the Buccaneer Days functions, as a lucky “treasure hunt” winner is showered with prize jewelry, Sayles lingers on Francine’s face when no one else is watching, and we see the determined effort it costs her to maintain the illusion of public-spirited boosterism; it could be one of the loneliest close-ups in movie history.

Oddly enough, though, loneliness is not the strongest impression Sayles makes in Sunshine State. There’s a sense of people’s better natures struggling to come out, with no real villains other than a couple of shady developers who are always sniffing around the edges of scenes (“vultures,” Marly calls them as they pore over maps and blueprints in the parking lot outside her restaurant). Instead, Sayles gives each character, even a troubled young pyromaniac, a sense of human decency that makes his movie a thing of wisdom and beauty.