Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

Sommersby Blu-ray Movie Review

Not an Officer, Not a Gentleman

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 21, 2013

Sommersby is a loose adaptation of the 1982 French film The Return of Martin Guerre, which dramatized a bizarre but true incident from the 16th Century that could fairly be described as the first recorded case of identity theft. Nicholar Meyer, whose work as writer-director includes Time After Time and several of the better Star Trek films, changed the story enough that Warner Bros. was able to convince themselves that they didn't need to buy the remake rights. But when Meyer left the project after the studio refused to let him direct it, replacement screenwriter Sarah Kernochan insisted that no amount of change could disguise the tale's origin. Warner Bros. eventually paid for the rights and acknowledged Martin Guerre in the credits.

Sommersby is especially notable for the surprisingly strong chemistry between co-stars Richard Gere and Jodi Foster, who share many intense scenes as the married couple (or possibly not) at the center of events. Casually and as if by chance (but really by design), director John Amiel (Copycat) fills out the frame with sketches of the rural South in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Perhaps because Amiel is British, he is able to view this history with a humane detachment that lets him give an even-handed portrayal of the suffering all around. Sommersby plays its drama against a landscape wrecked by battle and occupation, where everyone has lost friends and family, and no one sees prosperity in their future. The last thing these people need is uncertainty over the identity of the one man who seems to have an idea about how to improve the community's fortunes.

Sommersby opens with an extended title sequence, without dialogue, in which a ragged Confederate soldier slowly makes his way home on foot after the war's end. When he finally arrives in Vine Hill, Tennessee, the local townspeople do not at first recognize him, but when he identifies himself as their former neighbor, farm owner Jack Sommersby (Gere), they discern familiar features beneath the beard and shrunken frame. Jack, who had been presumed dead while he was languishing in a Yankee prison for four years, is welcomed back with tears and rejoicing.

Two people do not share in the joy. One is Jack's wife, Laurel (Foster). As we gradually discover, theirs was not a happy marriage. Jack drank, rarely spoke to his wife and was physically abusive. Before the war, the Sommersbys slept in separate bedrooms. But as often happens with war, the man who returns is much changed: quieter, more thoughtful, grateful just to be there. Despite the awkwardness of a long separation, Laurel finds herself falling in love more deeply than ever before.

The other person who is less than thrilled by Jack's return is the man who lost out to him in the contest for Laurel's hand in marriage, Orin Meecham (Bill Pullman), a leader of the local church led by Reverend Powell (William Windom). After losing a foot early in the war, Orin has stuck by Laurel ever since, helping her work the Sommersby farm, eventually extracting from her a promise to marry him, if Jack does not return by a certain date. Jack's reappearance dashes Orin's prospects for a second time.

Much of Sommersby is taken up with Jack's audacious plan to revive the fortunes of Vine Hill by switching its crop from cotton to tobacco. He agrees to sell off portions of his farm to anyone who will work the acreage and split the first year's crop with him, and the arrangement provides an overview of the state of racial tensions at the time, because Jack makes the offer to everyone, including freed slaves, which prompts the Klan to burn a cross in front of his home. Jack recognizes some of the men in white hoods. Some of them have personal motives.

As with the original story of Martin Guerre, the story concludes with a trial, but of an entirely different nature that shifts the dramatic weight of the story in intriguing ways. Among other things, the trial is held in a packed courtroom where, like in To Kill a Mockingbird, the white spectators sit in the courtroom and the black spectators are relegated to the gallery. When an African-American jurist, Judge Barry Conrad Isaacs, takes the bench with all the authority of someone played by the majestic James Earl Jones, a shocked buzz races through the courtroom. Just by shooting the reactions of the various onlookers, director Amiel provides a revealing portrait of the postbellum South. Then he returns to the foreground, where Jack Sommersby's identity and Laurel Sommersby's heart remain subjects of controversy to the very end.

Sommersby is an odd amalgam of romance and drama, and it isn't for everyone. When I first saw it, I was underwhelmed, because I couldn't stop comparing it to its inspiration, Daniel Vigne's The Return of Martin Guerre. This time around, I was better able to appreciate Sommersby on its own merits, which are considerable. Vigne's film views events with a worldly detachment, and it is structured as a mystery story, even though the outcome is known in advance (or certainly would be to a French audience). But where Martin Guerre is an inquest into a case of mass self-deception, Sommersby is more intimate and personal. It's a story about people trying to forge new lives from the fragments of a society devastated by war and grateful to anyone who shows them a way forward.

Sommersby Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The teal-and-orange fetishists will find nothing to complain about here. Sommersby is a symphony of earth tones delicately composed by production designer Bruno Rubeo (Driving Miss Daisy) and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, who won an Oscar in the year of Sommersby's release for A River Runs Through It. Rousselot is a soulful painter of everything from the pop-infused Parisian streets of Diva to the historical evocations of Dangerous Liaisons. In Sommersby, he accentuates the browned-out wasteland of Vine Hill when Jack Sommersby arrives, then gradually turns it green as Sommersby's presence revives it. Inside the Sommersby farmhouse, his elegant use of shadow helps convey the sense of uncertainty as Jack and Laurel (re)discover each other and achieve a closeness that neither of them would ever have imagined.

Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is one of its better catalog efforts, providing an engrossing and film-like reproduction of Rousselot's imagery. Detail is excellent, blacks are deep, contrast is appropriately subdued so that shadow detail always remains visible, and the entire affair has a velvety texture that gives the image depth and substance. The film's grain texture is fine, natural-looking and undisturbed by inappropriate digital manipulation. The use of a BD-50 has allowed more than sufficient room to avoid over-compression. Whether or not Sommersby is to your taste as a drama, its treatment on Blu-ray can't be faulted.

Sommersby Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

I have been unable to confirm the original audio format of Sommersby's theatrical release. It hit theaters less than a year before Dolby Digital became officially available on motion pictures and several months before the launch of DTS. Warner's 1999 DVD of the film featured only a DD 2.0 soundtrack, but that is not definitive, because Warner sometimes used a low-bit 2.0 soundtrack on its early DVDs to conserve space (a notable example being Dolores Claiborne).

In any case, the Blu-ray's track is a robust DTS-HD MA 5.1, which provides substantial breathing room to the atypically romantic orchestral score by Danny Elfman. Consistent with director Amiel's emphasis on the inner life of the main characters, the score receives more emphasis than sound effects in the film's mix, although the effects are certainly present and clearly reproduced, e.g., the various sounds of the Vine Hill citizens gradually coaxing a tobacco crop from the land, and the numerous reactions from the courtroom crowd to the increasingly bizarre developments of the Sommersby case. Dynamic range is appropriately wide, and one can tell from the musical reproduction that bass extension is clearly available, but the film's sound design doesn't call upon it. Except for one mild fistfight, Sommersby is not an action film. The dialogue is always clear, and I never found the regional accents a barrier to understanding. (I can't vouch for their authenticity.)

Sommersby Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Other than the film's trailer (480i; 2.34:1, enhanced; 2:00), the disc contains no extras.

Sommersby Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

An American setting is especially powerful for a story about second chances, and it's not accidental that the least admirable characters in Sommersby are those who are unwilling to move forward, like the witness in Judge Isaacs' court who tells His Honor that he'll soon be back in the fields where he belongs, or Orin Meecham, who responded to romantic disappointment by hanging around the woman who didn't choose him, hoping her marriage would fail. Whoever Jack Sommersby might be, he looks to the future, and that's why Laurel and the people of Vine Hill warm to him. Not for everyone, but highly recommended.