DISAPPEARANCES (2006) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Jay Craven
Kris Kristofferson, Genevieve Bujold, Charlie McDermott,
Lothaire Bluteau, Gary Farmer, William Sanderson
The first thing you see in this movie is a 15-year-old boy, played by Charlie McDermott, and his aunt, played by Genevieve Bujold, walking together from their farm to the local school, where she teaches and he's trying to make sense of "Paradise Lost". A horse-drawn coach goes by, carrying two riders on top and a coffin. "Who died?" the boy asks. "Nobody," his aunt replies, and the next thing you see, the two riders on the coach are gone. That's the first of many disappearances in a movie that's haunted by them. Kris Kristofferson plays the kid's dad, a farmer in Prohibition-Era Vermont, who returns to running bootleg whiskey over the Canadian border after a freak fire destroys his barn. It's part ghost story, part shaggy-dog adventure story and part coming-of-age story, with the emphasis not on the customary obsession with getting laid, but on learning to cope with the inevitability of loss. You can't always tell reality from illusion, and as Bujold's character explains it, you're not supposed to. It's a movie that goes its own way in any case, and with a regional accent, a crooked sense of humor and the north-woods equivalent of magic realism at work, it does the job. "Ain't this the most spectacular trip you ever imagined?" Kristofferson asks at one point. And for the adventures to be had, and the life lessons learned, for a kid of 15, it just might be.
Kris Kristofferson
(1936-2024)
