COLEWELL (2019) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Tom Quinn
Karen Allen, Kevin J. O'Connor, Hannah Gross,
Craig Walker, Daniel Jenkins, Malachy Cleary
Karen Allen, well into her sixties and looking it, plays a woman named Nora, a widow who runs the post office in the dot-on-the-map town of Colewell, Pennsylvania. When she gets the word that the Postal Service is closing her office down (and eliminating her job), it hits her hard - it hits the whole town hard- but there's nothing anybody can do. Nora's options are to retire or relocate, and neither choice is acceptable. It's an idealized portrait of small-town life, in which everybody's friendly, everybody knows everybody else, almost everybody's old, and the post office is the social center of the community. Most of the townsfolk appear to be played by locals, but the heart of the movie is Allen, who doesn't just let the years and miles show, but uses them to define her character. It's almost as if she had waited her whole life to be able to play parts like this. That's not such a bad thing, if you've got the skill to pull it off, the material to pull it off with, and the luck to grow old like Karen Allen.
