The story develops sardonic humor as the worst keeps happening: The rising waters engulf the skiff; men fire on him or threaten to dynamite or ram his boat. But he won't change out of his convict's uniform until the mud has made it unrecognizable, and he steadfastly refuses to relinquish his government-issued craft even when friendly boatmen demand it before they'll give him and his passengers a ride. When he veers out of Mississippi into a Louisiana bayou and partners up with a Cajun gator hunter, he relaxes his prison consciousness: He experiences the difference between meaningless toil and gratifying work. Even though he's serving a lengthy sentence for attempting to rob a train while under the influence of pulp fiction, he's determined to bring his charges to safety and finish his sentence as good time. Despite its rough and (in the end) arbitrary justice, prison has helped him clear his mind; when he leaves, it will be with a clean record.
Dramatizing the sustaining power of an ordinary man's self-made ethic has defeated many an American writer, but in Old Man Faulkner does it without sentimentality or false rhetoric. And the movie version, premiering on CBS' Hallmark Hall of Fame next Sunday, enlarges the story's spectrum of feeling; the prisoner gets a taste of tenderness as he severs the bond with his traveling mate. By definition, this may be a TV film, but it has a spaciousness and lift that belong on the big screen. Arliss Howard, as the convict, delivers a staggering performance, catching you up in the eddies of the hero's confused emotions, just as the director, John Kent Harrison, plunges you into the vortices and muck of the flooded countryside and the bayou. It's a rich backstage joke that Jeanne Tripplehorn, who plays the woman with warmth and empathy, previously costarred in Waterworld, an action film that spent megabucks creating an aquatic planet and putting it at the service of a feeble ecological fable. Old Man, doubtless made for a pittance, uses a scary watery reality as the setting for a roiling saga of birth and rebirth.
Taking off from a screenplay by Horton Foote (which is looser and more inventive than we'd ordinarily expect from the writer of rural mood pieces such as Tender Mercies), Harrison cleaves to Faulkner's hard edge while allowing a sweetness to seep into the body of the material. Faulkner ends his novella with the suggestion that the man became a train robber to impress his girlfriend, who later married another man; indeed, in the last line, the fed-up convict exclaims, "Women!" Harrison and Foote acknowledge the old girlfriend at the start, then focus on the connections rather than the friction between the convict and the rescued mother. That choice is right for this movie: Without diluting the starkness of the drama and the existential comedy, it multiplies the story's possibilities.
In the novella's third-person narration, Faulkner writes of "that rapport of the wedded conferred...by the two weeks during which they had jointly suffered all the crises, emotional social economic and even moral, which do not always occur even in the ordinary fifty married years"; he notes that the two lead characters bond because they're both backwoods natives, heirs to the same "hill-bred Abraham." The filmmakers subtly dramatize how the convict renews himself and grows in stature by allowing their unstated intimacy to enter his heart. And this soulful expansiveness fits his unexpected odyssey. If the movie of Old Man has a message, it's that you've got to balance goals against going with the flow.
After several startling, surreal episodes, including a baptismal glide through the steeple of a church knocked sideways by the flood, the convict and mother hitch a ride on a riverboat headed for New Orleans. (They think it will drop them near the woman's family farm.) As they hear Cajun dialect and music for the first time--and endure the condescension of a well-meaning doctor--they silently seal their (platonic) union. At that juncture, the movie leaps into a lyrical realm. It isn't just the country-French accents that remind you of early Jean Renoir. The clog-beat of the Cajun music gives a rhythmic underlay to the sparse dialogue, and the camera waltzes around the scene, linking up details like a little girl sunning herself or a man playing a squeeze-box in front of a caged duck. The characters are as liberated from routine as the script is from formula. The movie Old Man is like a boat that rides steadier the further it moves into unknown waters.
Near the start, the authorities chain prisoners to the back of a truck that rides on a raised levee to the head of the flood. The men fear they'll drown in chains, and as he looks through the slats on the truck, the convict glimpses catastrophes, including a farm wife hanging onto the ridgepole of a house as her husband slides down the roof with a squirming pig. Up to that point, Howard has been etching a self-contained character who looks at ease only with his mule. But Howard italicizes every feature on his face when he reacts with shock to the nightmarish spectacle. And as the film goes on, suspense and dry native wit well up from the convict's mulishness. It's a monumental piece of acting. With growls and clipped utterances that emanate from his gut and nuances that flicker around his weathered eyes and mouth, Howard creates a character who's as expressive as he is inarticulate. You can read the alterations of his attitude in his walk. Deeply awkward (at first) with the woman and the baby, he turns limber (and even smiles) when they recuperate from exhaustion with a friendly Cajun and he joins their host on a gator hunt. The Cajun (delightfully played by novice actor Daro Latiolais) is a master gesticulator who can't speak English. When the Cajun prepares to shoot a gator, the convict instead grabs the reptile and slaughters it with a blade. "A hog's a hog, as long as you got a knife," he explains, amused at his new friend's perception of his valor. The convict taps into his primordial manhood and asserts his core creativity--the next time we see him wrestle a gator and kill the critter with a knife, it comes off as a ritual, a dance.
Although the Cajun shanty functions as a mini-Eden, it can't last: The authorities must evacuate the bayou before they dynamite a levee to take the flood pressure off of New Orleans. Still, the theme of this section isn't paradise lost, but a design for living found. The convict has learned that normal pleasures are within his reach. Without saying "I love you," the woman conveys that she cares for him as a wife does for a husband--a tribute to the gumption Tripplehorn gives to an underwritten part. Old Man has the inside-out emotionality of a great adventure: In conquering the elements, the man and woman defeat the uncertainties within themselves. And director Harrison's stunning use of the Alligator Bayou location brings home their mutual victory viscerally. The misty skies blend with the water stretching to the horizon, so that the landscape seems endless and enclosed. It's as if the convict has discovered a vast open-air cavern, where the trees resemble prehistoric rock formations and a person can read the time of day only by how the sun registers on their bark.
Harrison and Foote lavish a similar textured treatment on the characters--including the convict's warden, who fixates on the idea of winning glory for himself by having our presumed-dead hero honored on his watch. When the convict arrives "home" in triumph only to realize he's upset the warden's plans, Howard's miming of satisfaction, perplexity, and despair is one of the damnedest flights of acting imagination I've ever seen. Because of his full-throated grunts and body language as well as Harrison's visual majesty, Old Man is an adaptation that's also a glorious original.
Old Man.
Arliss Howard and Jeanne Tripplehorn. Written by Horton Foote, from the Old Man section of William Faulkner's The Wild Palms. Directed by John Kent Harrison. Airing Sunday, February 9, 8 p.m., CBS KTVT-Channel 11.
