A coffin bursts from the surface of a large water body, a vision of a man responsible for many lives in the face of oblivion. It's 1955, but the long-standing town of Northfork is trapped in time and its unwillingness to leave a land doomed by the march of progress. Its land is carved by glaciers before time itself, home to scrub brush and angels, offering nothing but endless expanse and the inevitability of death - and thus begins Northfork, one of the most strange and haunting films I've ever seen.
Walter O'Brien (James Woods) is the head of a team, including his son Willis (the film's co-writer and co-producer Mark Polish), charged with evacuating the final holdout citizens of Northfork, Montana, a barren outpost due to be flooded in order to power a hydroelectric dam. His team wear identical black hats and black overcoats and are quite forlorn about their task. Though the town will be rebuilt once the power is running, there are those who insist on staying on. Perhaps they wish to remain with their buried loved ones, though most of the graves have been dug up and shipped out. Among the stubborn is Father Harlan (Nick Nolte) who performs his sermons in his church even though the back wall is missing, revealing brush-thin glacier fields adorned with cows. Part of his meager duties is to look after Irwin (Duel Farnes), the ailing adopted son of Mr. (an uncredited Clark Gregg,) and Mrs. (Claire Forlani) Hadfield, as the Hadfields plan to abandon him with Harlan, thinking him too ill to travel with them and Harlan was the one who cared for him originally after the death of his parents:
"You gave us a sick child!" Mr. Hadfield complains, to which Harlan replies,
"I gave you an angel."
Unable to move, Irwin wanders the town in his mind, and as he visits his family grave (adorned with pictures of his parents simply marked "Mother" and "Father" and topped with an empty frame for his own) he is approached by Flower Hercules (Daryl Hannah), quite oddly dressed in Elizabethan wear. She is one of four true angels, the others being Happy (Anthony Edwards), who has wooden hands and wears multi-lensed spectacles; Cup of Tea (Robin Sachs), who drinks tea and seems terribly amused with everything; and the mute Cod (Ben Foster), dressed in pasty makeup and a cowboy suit. They believe that Irwin could be the key to the prophecy of the Unknown Angel, and Irwin's request in exchange for helping them is to be taken with the angels when they leave, or at least 1000 miles away. They also have a horse, though considering it's constructed from scrap wood and moves like one of the giraffe costumes from Julie Taymor's Broadway version of The Lion King one can't be too sure.
While the holdouts include a man with two brand new matching Cadillacs and one who simply fires his shotgun at the team, a particularly difficult case are the Stalling (get it?) family (a man and his two wives) who put their house on top of an ark upon impending orders from God. Their predicament spurs one of the best scenes of the film, as Walter O'Brien spins a hypothetical future in which their boat doesn't float but they refuse help anyways, as they are waiting for the sign. Of course it ends with their death, to which one of the wives sputters, "But we died!" This sales pitch ends with O'Brien and Son offering them a case containing two large white wings - "Something only God can offer" - along with a letter written and signed by Father Harlan himself. As it turns out, Irwin claims to be shot with a tranquilizer gun (which he brought to the angels in a similar black case) and has scars on his back consistent with severed wings. Neither the men or the angels truly believe what they are being presented with, but as the deadline approaches we can't help but see a magic window open just beyond the grasp of Modern Times.
There are so many strange images in this film, some drawn from particulars of the evacuation, such as a bathtub held by its drainpipe far above the ground, and others borne in the windswept imaginations of the Polish Brothers, such as the wooden horse. All the disparate motifs weave a tapestry of death and pity, modernism clashing with antiquity, and the impossibility of ordinary people to comprehend divinity on Earth. A recurring image is that of one of O'Brien's men who was accidentally trapped in the wall of the dam as it was being filled in with concrete, and the men visit it simply to touch the lump of their brother, forever trapped in their monument to progress ("The son-of-a-bitch's getting the biggest headstone this side of Rushmore."). One scene in particular, in which the men visit a local café run by a woman who could pass for a Halloween mask's mummy and have to guess what she's serving, is so bizarre and seemingly unnecessary to the story I can't imagine why it wasn't cut, almost Lynchian in its frustrating illogic. There are a few other small crinkles in the film, such as a couple of groan-inducing jokes and storefront signs clearly made with Microsoft Word, but for the most part the film is remarkably airtight considering its complex ideas. A quirky sense of humor is even allowed to creep in to the proceedings, mostly surrounding the evacuation team and the angels.
While the movie is in color you wouldn't know it if you weren't wearing your good glasses - the color scheme is dourly washed out, as if the glacier-carved nothingness of the landscape has stained everything on it. The sets and costumes perfectly capture a town dragging its heels through the 20th century, adopting the new as it can but rooted in the ill-advised dreams of a long-forgotten westward surge. Each of the houses sit on blocks in the middle of a blasted nothing, as if dropped from the sky onto some distant moon, outposts for travelers who will never survive the trip. If the acting wasn't so pitch-perfect the audience would be equally lost, and the contrapuntal groups of men and angels play off each other beautifully, creating an engrossing dance across an otherwise empty floor. The cinematography by M. David Mullen is precise and passionately framed, allowing for rich compositions and deep focuses that accentuate the grainy angles of Northfork's death. Draped over all of this is Stuart Matthewman's aching soundtrack, deeply sad and inflected by the myth of the American West.
The film is the creation of identical twin brothers Michael and Mark Polish, whose debut Twin Falls Idaho, in which they themselves played conjoined twins, confirmed them as true originals of independent cinema. Shot for a meager $ 1.9 million budget, the Polish's payed for everything out of their own pockets, and only after winning several awards at film festivals was the film vindicated by distribution by Paramount. It has yet to gain a real audience, and its slow pace and overwhelming embrace of mortality may keep it that way. I've seen it three times now and will see it many more, and while I can't say I completely understand Northfork I can't deny its hypnotic pull on my psyche and my heart. It's unlike any other film I've ever seen, and its beauty and poignancy only seems to grow every time I watch it. It's the kind of film not meant to be deciphered but rather embraced unconditionally, allowing it to sing you into another world, free of explanation and invoking our collective unconscious. You can't be certain of the answers, but you feel the remains of the ancient emotions that hold the only keys that matter.
~PNK
