7.7 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Biography of Loretta Lynn, a country and western singer who rose from poverty to fame.
Starring: Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones, Beverly D'Angelo, Levon Helm, William SandersonMusic | 100% |
Biography | 23% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: DTS 2.0
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Mobile features
Slipcover in original pressing
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Coal Miner's Daughter was an unexpected hit for Universal, and then a major awards contender, because the studio thought it was making a low-budget special interest film with no major stars and a little-known British director whose experience was mostly in TV. Since the studio didn't expect much from the film, they left everyone alone to do their best work. The result pleased not only country singing star Loretta Lynn, on whose autobiography the film was based, but also her notoriously prickly husband and manager, Doolittle "Mooney" Lynn (real name: Oliver), Loretta's legions of fans, and just about anyone who likes a good story, well told. Sissy Spacek won the Best Actress Oscar for her convincing incarnation of Loretta Lynn from the ages of 14 through her mid-40s, and the film was nominated for an additional six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Tommy Lee Jones's portrayal of Doolittle was widely overlooked during awards season, in what has since been generally acknowledged as an injustice, but the film helped launch Jones's career. Coal Miner's Daughter doesn't follow the standard template for a show business bio-pic, but that's because Lynn's career itself was unusual. She wasn't driven to perform by some inner demon. As she observed to director Michael Apted in the 2003 interview included as an extra, she might easily have remained in the mining town of Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, where she was born and raised. Or she might have stayed a housewife and mother in Washington State, where she and Doolittle moved after they were married. Her career as a singer was really a double act, because it was Doolittle who sensed her talent and, as the film depicts in detail, literally forced her onto the stage. Once there, she discovered a natural gift for connecting with an audience. A star was born. The script by Tom Rickman (Everybody's All-American ) perfectly captures the sense in which the tempestuous Lynn marriage and Loretta's singing career are inextricably bound together. Apted, who had the advantage of being a foreigner looking at Appalachian mining country with fresh eyes, immediately grasped the centrality of that world to Lynn's songs and her appeal as an entertainer. He set about trying to portray the world as truthfully as possible, rejecting professional actors in favor of local talent and casting musician Levon Helm, an Arkansas native, in the pivotal role of Lynn's father, Ted Webb, the "coal miner" of the title, who died too young to see his daughter's success but whose presence echoes throughout the film and Loretta's career.
Cinematographer Ralf D. Bode (Saturday Night Fever and Dressed to Kill) received an Oscar nomination for his delicate lighting of the many locations in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, where Coal Miner's Daughter was filmed, often under adverse conditions. Universal's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is one of its better catalog efforts, which doesn't appear to have been subjected to the company's typical treatment intended to transform film into video. Detail is quite good, especially in complex outdoor scenes and crowds (whether of miners and their families or audiences at performances), and blacks are dark and solid. The film's grain pattern is readily observable, and it appears to be fine and natural, undisturbed by the artificial sharpening that so commonly appears in Universal titles. The color palette is terrific, with the warm earth tones of Butcher Hollow gradually supplanted by the brighter, less natural blues, reds and purples of recording studios, big cities and the world of show business. With the extras in standard definition on a BD-50, the main feature has been given a healthy average bitrate of just under 32 Mbps, which no doubt accounts for the absence of compression artifacts in the film's considerably active grain. Except for some slight instability in the opening titles, this is a superb rendition of Coal Miner's Daughter.
According to the best information I could find, Coal Miner's Daughter was originally released to theaters in mono, which was also the format on the first DVD release in 2003. For the second DVD release two years later, Universal offered a Dolby Digital 5.1 track, but the remix was reportedly limited to the musical numbers, leaving the rest of the soundtrack as mono. The same mix appears to have used on the Blu-ray, encoded as lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1. The track has remarkably good fidelity, and the musical performances have surprising fullness and depth. The theatrical portions of the film remain front-oriented, but the dialogue is clear, the dynamic range is wide and the sound effects make a suitable impact.
The extras have been ported over from Universal's 2003 DVD release of Coal Miner's Daughter. The same extras appeared two years later on the "25th Anniversary Edition" DVD, which included a photo journal (omitted here).
Loretta Lynn's fans love the fact that she has always remained a simple country girl at heart, but one of the many strengths of Coal Miner's Daughter is how effectively it demonstrates that there is nothing "simple" about it. Humility, perseverance, loyalty to friends, devotion to family—all the qualities for which Loretta celebrated her mother and father—are easy to talk about, but difficult to maintain in the face of life's many challenges. Apted's film and Spacek's performance give the viewer a taste of the daily effort required to live up to those virtues through the life of someone who just happened to discover she had a talent for singing about them. Highly recommended.
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