Bad Movies and New England Sensibilities (Or, Dan Tries to Write a Column)

You ever see a movie that was so bad, it sticks with you for a while?

This was me with Radio Cape Cod, a movie I had the distinct displeasure to view at a small, independent movie theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts a few weeks ago.

Radio Cape Cod's plot is innocuous and acceptable enough: it traces four parallel love stories and the trials and tribulations that these people underwent. The cinematography was excellent, in a technical sense--we are treated to lush views of beautiful Cape Cod and the waves therein. Tamzin Outhwaite played the part of radio host quite well, too.

The rest of the characters just infuriated me. Tamzin's daughter is insufferably annoying, as is the burgeoning Bridezilla character (I hate the term, but better ones escape me). Julian Silver's character is perfectly awful: he plays the part of the existentialist teenager to utterly nettlesome heights, at one point waxing philosophical to a prospective girlfriend on how the newly-minted romantic love in her mother's life was merely the product of a gonad-driven phenomenon (the mother, of course, had lost her husband recently beforehand). Truthful or not, the remarks are just irritating.

Really, though, what stuck with me was the picturesque liberal fantasy that the film depicted. The movie starts out with an ode to "slow food," fast food's antithesis, based on healthy ingredients and time bonding with other people. Sunday's character, a progressive/liberal graduate student in marine biology, is first seen wearing... you guessed it, a stereotypical Che Guevara t-shirt! He delivers an Al Gore-ian soliloquoy about our responsibility towards microbiological life forms--to a captive audience in Tamzin Outhwaite. The smart kid (Virgil, played by Julian Silver) is a devotee of a barren and bleak philosophical system. Cooperation is taken to new heights, while any form of competition is belittled as immature.

The tone, then, came across as somewhat wistful throughout. If only the rest of the country were as progressive and refined as we are. Most of the sparse audience ate it up.

All of this comes across as the warped fantasy of a film student, and that was the impression I got watching the film. This was the final product of a film student's four years immersed in the liberal wasteland that is Boston, carried along by some irritating friends and overly earnest faculty. A favor or two got the film into Coolidge Corner's smallest screening room (17 seats), and it was passed off as something particularly brilliant and visionary.

In reality, this was the work of an older director, a Boston-resident and real estate salesman named Andrew Silver. Silver is one of those types who has limitless energy and intelligence, it seems; he studied oceanography in graduate school and then got a doctorate in business administration--but he's first come to my attention as a filmmaker.

Some with more patience will probably like the movie a bit, appreciating it for its slow pace and beautiful film work. Still, the sensibilities of the film are undoubtedly New England, with the focus on "slow food" and Che and environmental consciousness. Perhaps this is why the movie was so warmly reviewed in Boston. They are watching their movie in an echo chamber of these sensibilities, far detached from the concerns of everyday life elsewhere. There is much about Boston to love, but a conservative can only be bothered by this liberal worldview that resonates so strongly amongst the city's "elites." Visiting Boston, it hits you in multiple directions. Living in Boston, I can only imagine. One is left wondering what went wrong over the past 240 years.