Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.5

Main Street Blu-ray Movie Review

Blink and you’ll miss it, but you won’t be missing much.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater November 15, 2011

My father’s parents live in a small town in rural western Maryland that hasn’t changed much in the last forty years. For the better, that is. It used to be a minor industrial hub—with coal mines, iron processing plants, a paper mill, and a tire factory—but the local economy dried up a generation ago, leaving the town a husk of its former self. Every time I visit, I notice the gradual, inexorable decline—the houses growing more dilapidated, the businesses shuttering, the rust and peeling paint and trash-strewn yards. It’s as if the place loosed a collective death rattle back in the ‘70s and has been decomposing ever since. Of course, it’s not as simple as the town’s hardy Scottish and German stock just giving up. As the national economy moves—largely away from industry and manufacturing—so goes the fates of the countless thousands of similar blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nowheresvilles that were chiseled out of the American wilderness by blue collar labor. How can these towns evolve to keep up with the times?

That’s the central question posed in the sadly doze-worthy drama Main Street, the last film penned by the late Horton Foote, the Academy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter best known for Tender Mercies and his adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Actress Tess Harper has called Foote “America’s Chekhov…a quiet man who writes quiet people,” and while Main Street does indulge in the same kind of hushed, common folk futility that the great Russian writer did best, Foote’s screenplay is too quiet, so much so that it’s almost dramatically inert. This is a film in which nearly nothing of consequence happens.

The setting is Durham, North Carolina, which director John Doyle mistakenly portrays as the kind of podunk, economically flailing small town that young people are fleeing in droves. (When, in fact, it’s the home of Duke University, has a great arts scene, and is doing fairly well, commerce-wise.) Here, Durham is a decaying southern city left utterly vacant after the cigarette industry pulled out in the 1960s—when the nation finally realized smoking’s health effects—leaving behind scores of empty tobacco warehouses. Ellen Burstyn plays Georgiana Carr, an aging, panic-attack-prone widow and tobacco heiress whose fortunes have seriously dwindled. Looking for a way to make some easy cash—enough, at least, to cover her hefty property taxes—Georgiana rents out her warehouses to Texan businessman Gus Leroy (Colin Firth), without ever asking him what he plans to store in them.

If she’d known the truth—that Leroy works for a “hazardous waste” disposal company, and that her warehouses are being filled with barrels of dangerous chemicals—she probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. But by the time she finds out, it’s too late. With help from Willa (Patricia Clarkson), her divorced niece, Georgiana initially tries to get Gus and his toxic canisters removed, but legally, she has no grounds for forced eviction. The twist here—if you want to call it that—is that Leroy really isn’t the bad guy we initially assume him to be. Over dinner with Georgiana and at a town council meeting, Gus makes his good intentions known—his company has a proven track record of setting up shop in small towns, lowering unemployment, and stimulating the local economy. The only downside is, well, all that pesky hazardous waste. It’s understandable that the locals are wary, but this might well be the town’s only shot at rejuvenation.

Set in narrative orbit around this main story is a rather superfluous sub-plot about Harris Parker (Orlando Bloom), a cop by day, law school student by night who’s running himself ragged trying to balance work and school while still maintaining some sort of social life. His former steady, Mary (Amber Tamblyn), has lost patience waiting for Harris to get his life sorted out, so she’s started dating a lawyer from the next town over, a sleazeball who turns out to be married. Devastated and sensing no future for herself in Durham, Mary plans to move to Atlanta, the closest metropolis. Meanwhile, Harris questions whether all his hard work has been worth it.

None of this really leads anywhere. In the final act, Foote tries to inject Main Street with some danger by having several 18-wheelers loaded with chemical waste bear down on Durham in the pouring rain—we fully expect a massive, fiery, hazmat-necessitating crash—but even this potential threat fizzles out like so many wet bottle rockets. Like I said above, nothing happens. Main Street feels less like a drama than an extended and ultimately pointless character study of a town in decline and the sad folks still trying to eek out a life there. Don’t get me wrong; the film does have its homey southern charms. For instance, in an early scene where the town council meets wearily to discuss stagnant development and the hopelessness of even bothering to have a Thanksgiving parade, Doyle brilliantly captures the self-stymieing bureaucratic attitude of rural elected officials faced with the impossible. The problem is, instead of continuing on this line—which would’ve given the story a larger scope—the film gets sidetracked by the inconsequential personal affairs of the town’s beleaguered residents. The film is filled with small-town details, but the big picture they construct is thematically hazy at best.

The casting, it should be said, is seven kinds of strange. Burstyn may be perfect as a panic-stricken North Carolinian geriatric—she can fret like nobody’s business—and Patricia Clarkson seems at home here in the deep south, but what’s up with the male leads? Sure, Orlando Bloom looks fetching in a cop uniform, but his American accent—which hasn’t improved at all since Elizabethtown—is sloppier than a sandwich made in the dark. And the usually reliable Colin Firth weirdly seems to be channeling a Lewinski scandal-era Bill Clinton—he’s a real smooth talker, but you don’t believe his act for a minute.

Main Street Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Unlike an increasing number of low-budget movies, Main Street was shot on 35mm instead of digitally. The film makes a decent showing on Blu- ray, where it features a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer, but the non-descript, almost style-less style of the lighting and cinematography makes for an image that's merely perfunctory. Realism is the attempt here—the picture isn't poeticized or dramatized at all—and color is always natural-looking. The palette isn't particularly vibrant, but the neutral tones are dense, black levels are deep, and contrast, if never exactly punchy, is at least balanced. There's more-than-adequate high definition detail to be noticed in close-ups, but overall the image is a bit soft. (Though I suspect this is intentional.) More importantly, grain hasn't been wiped out by DNR and there's no sign of adverse edge enhancement. Aside from some light noise, there aren't really any compression issues either. This is a stable and consistent transfer, even if the film isn't very visually stimulating.

Main Street Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As you've probably gathered from the review thus far, Main Street is an extremely quiet film, so you shouldn't expect much from the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track included here. Like the cinematography, the sound design is simple and rather unadorned. The emphasis is on clear dialogue reproduction—voices are always clean, unmuffled, and easy to understand—and the softly complementary score, which never gets loud or forceful enough to make much of an impression. The rear channels aren't called into action often, but you will hear some quiet street ambience from time to time, along with heavy rain during the big storm near the end of the film. In terms of dynamics, the mix gives off a somewhat flat response, but clarity is excellent throughout. No real complaints here. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

Main Street Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

A Day Behind the Scenes of Main Street (1080i, 5:06) Pretty much straight-up behind-the-scenes footage, with no interviews or commentary. Deleted Scenes (SD, 3:04) Main Street Trailer (1080p, 1:57) Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment (1080p, 6:43)

Main Street Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Like the kind of depressed small towns it attempts to comment upon, Main Street just doesn't have much going for it. The story has a serious drama deficit, it's dull, and it's shot with the style-less low-budget simplicity of a made-for-TV movie. Magnolia's Blu-ray looks and sounds decent, but here's my advice—if you come across Main Street, just keep on driving.