There was a time when the American road meant you had a chance.
You got in the car with bad coffee (ehmmmm Americano) in a paper cup and somebody you might love sitting beside you. If that someone was a hunting mutt, it might even love you back. There was a map folded wrong in the glove box. There was a town somewhere ahead with a neon vacancy sign. You did not need to know what came next. The road was enough.
It promised distance. Distance promised reinvention.
Now the road is still there, black and hot and running through the trees. But it has changed its mind about us.
Alexander Ullom's It Ends understands this. Four young men get into a Jeep after college. They are supposed to be standing at the beginning of their adult lives. They go out for food. It is the sort of night that happens in every college town. A last drive. A last joke. A last hour before everyone becomes serious.
Then they take the wrong road.
It is an ordinary road at first. Two lanes. Woods. Nothing remarkable. Then it does not end. They drive for hours. Then days. Then longer. The gas does not run out. The road does not take them anywhere. When they stop, people come from the trees.
That is horror. But it is also a very clean picture of being young in America.
For a long time, the country told its young people that motion was salvation. Go west. Leave home. Take the job. Follow the girl. Start over. Get in the car and make something happen.
It Ends takes that old promise and leaves it on the shoulder of the road.
The young men have endless movement and no freedom at all. They can go forward forever. They cannot arrive. They cannot turn around. They cannot make the simple decision that every American movie has taught us is available. They cannot leave.
There is something grimly funny about it. The old road movies made escape look romantic. There was always a motorcycle, a convertible, a desert, a long shot of the horizon. Nobody mentioned rent. Nobody mentioned student debt. Nobody mentioned the feeling that you are working hard at a life that has not yet agreed to begin.
Ullom's road is not Route 66. It is a hallway with trees.
The picture was made for almost no money, which makes its existence feel right. It came out of North Florida, out of the kind of film community where people borrow equipment, call in favors and work long hours because no one has told them they cannot make a movie. It nearly disappeared before finding its way into theaters. That is another American story. The small thing survives because somebody sees it before it is gone.
The film is about a trap. Its making was an escape.
The Girl in Las Cruces
America looks different when you do not grow up here.
A German girl comes to Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 2001. She is sixteen. She has crossed an ocean carrying the America she has been sold by records, television, films and the simple confidence of American faces. She expects the country to reveal itself.
Instead, there is school.
There is heat that sits on the town like a hand. There are hallways, parties, awkward silences, suburban streets and evenings that seem to last too long. There are boys who are interesting because they are close by. There is desert beyond the town, vast and indifferent, making every small human problem look both ridiculous and serious.
This is the world of I'll Be Gone in June.
The girl is named Franny. She is not looking for grand history. She is looking for the America that exists when nothing important is happening. That is usually the real America anyway.
Foreigners often understand this country better than Americans do. They have not learned to ignore the peculiar things. They notice the giant parking lots. The strange devotion to high school and, in particular, high school sports. The houses made of wood. The ice machine in the hallway of a motel. The way a small town can feel empty and crowded at the same time.
They see the grandeur and the loneliness together.
Franny comes to New Mexico before the attacks of September 11 and remains as the country changes. She is young enough to feel history before she fully understands it. This is how history often comes to people. It is not announced with a brass band. It enters the room and makes everyone speak differently.
The film is built from director Katharina Rivilis's own memories of being an exchange student in Las Cruces. That gives the story a kind of truth that cannot be manufactured. It is not merely an American coming-of-age story. It is about seeing America from outside, then watching the country become less certain of itself.
The desert helps.
The desert has no interest in your national myth. It does not care what you saw in movies. It waits beyond the subdivision and the school parking lot. It reminds everyone that they are small and temporary and still alive.
Dolly Parton in the Dark
Dolly Parton understood the old America better than most people who spent their careers trying to explain it.
She knew that people wanted beauty, but they also wanted laughter. She knew that sorrow needed a joke nearby or it became too heavy to carry. She knew that being poor did not make a person less grand. Sometimes it made them more inventive.
She came out of the mountains with a voice that could break your heart and a sense of humor that could save you from it.
In Steel Magnolias, she plays Truvy, the owner of a beauty salon in a Louisiana town. The salon is a small room with chairs, mirrors, hair spray and women talking. But it is also the center of the world.
People tell the truth in beauty salons because there is nowhere else to put it.
They say what happened at home. They say who is dying. They say who is drinking. They say what they should not have said. They complain. They laugh. They survive. In Steel Magnolias, the women do not survive because they are untouched by grief. They survive because they have each other and because they are not afraid to make a sharp joke when the room becomes unbearable.
Dolly knew how to play that.
She had the gift of seeming glamorous without seeming remote. She could wear enough sequins to light a county fair and still make you believe she would help you move a couch. She made warmth look effortless. It was not effortless. That was the skill.
In The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, she enters a louder version of American mythology. Texas is all music, politics, sex, foolishness and men who think they are running things. Burt Reynolds is there in his sheriff's hat. Dolly is there in hers, which is invisible but somehow more powerful.
Then she sings I Will Always Love You.
The song is not angry. That is what makes it hard. It says goodbye without trying to wound the person being left behind. It accepts the hurt. It gives the hurt a melody. Then it lets the melody walk away with dignity.
That is a rare American emotion. The country is good at revenge. It is good at victory. It is good at pretending not to care. It is not always good at gracious departure.
Dolly was.
Now people will sit in theaters and watch her again. She will appear young and alive and completely certain of how to hold a room. She will speak. She will sing. The audience will laugh at a line they have heard before. Then, for a little while, no one will have to use the past tense.
That is one of the bargains movies offer us.
The people on the screen do not know they are gone.
The Things We Keep
Americana is not an antique store. It is not a flag printed on a shirt. It is not a truck with rust on the door. It is not a cracked guitar, a diner booth, a motel sign or a faded photograph of somebody's grandfather in uniform. Those things can be beautiful. They can be real. But they are props until someone brings a life to them.
Americana is what remains after the decoration is gone.
It is four young men in a Jeep realizing the road will not save them.
It is a German girl in a New Mexico town learning that America is less like a movie than she hoped and more like one than she expected.
It is a group of women in a beauty salon carrying one another through the worst day of their lives.
It is Dolly Parton singing goodbye in a way that makes goodbye bearable.
The road still runs through the country. It crosses mountains, suburbs, truck stops, churches, fields, deserts and towns where the main street has three empty storefronts and one place still serving breakfast. People still get in cars because they want to go somewhere else. They still believe a town ahead might be better. They still believe that movement means possibility.
Sometimes they are right.
Sometimes the road ends at a place where someone remembers your name. Sometimes it leads to a room full of people who will not let you carry the hard thing alone. Sometimes it brings you to a song that says exactly what you could not say yourself.
And sometimes it does not end at all.