Three days ago, I was looking again for a cinematic "sleeping pill", and so I ran over "The Milagro Beanfield War". A totally wrong choice for the intended purpose, as I found out after watching it. And when I found out I decided I must write a blog entry about it. So here we are...
The movie is directed by Robert Redford, which "recommended" it for my search. With all respect for his acting skills, I don't think there's any other directing attempt from Redford to impress me in any way. It's true I've never got to watch "Ordinary People", considered probably his best movie, but out of the rest of what I've seen the script or the subject typically saved the movie, and the directing always felt somewhere between bland and absent. That's why here I had a shock, experiencing exactly the opposite.
There's no complicated subject in this movie. We're somewhere close to the US border with Mexico, in Milagro, a small forgotten town, with a predominantly hispanic population, close to its extinction being overshadowed by a residential complex in development. In this setting we find Jose aka Joe Mondragon who dares the unthinkable - to use water spilled from the property of the landlord who bought almost the entire region to irigate his own field of beans. People start talking, panicking and get close to rioting, splitting between the two sides - pro and agains the capitalst opression. And like that, we get a series of events that lead to a mini "revolucion". What's really catchy in the movie is how this series of events is staged...
I'd say that although produced more than thirty years ago, the movie fits quite well with the more recent trends, drawing some clear lines like anti-system and others. I'm more and more bored of overusing stuff like that in a media like movies, where in more than one hundred years propaganda was way too often present (whatever kind of that was), trying to overshadow the artistic or even the entertainment side. However, unlike the increasing accent on such direction in the latter years, here I can appreciate the fact that this comes second, much less obvious than in many recent movies, and that's thanks to the direction. The movie has a character and situation comic that's so present, fortunately raising on top of other nuances and preventing these to become too.. "aggressive" (maybe less in the end). It's an excellent mix between the acting, the symbolism, a bit of romance, a bit of fantasy, and lots of humor. The actors have a merit, the script has its merit, the score has a merit, but on top of everything, it's clearly, by far, the best movie directed by Redford I've seen by now, and I think the direction has the largest merit in the final result.
Rating: 4 out of 5
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