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Coastlines

2006, Movie, R, 100 mins

Coastlines: Review

COASTLINES
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Longtime independent writer-director Victor Nunez brings a rare combination of homegrown regional sensibility and genuine filmmaking skills to his low-key stories of small-town life on Florida's gulf coast. That this deceptively quiet crime thriller about an ex con's troubled homecoming sat on the shelf for four years before finding commercial distribution speaks volumes about both the voracious appetite for sand/surf/summer-break cliches and Hollywood's willingness to pander to it. There's no fanfare when ne'er-do-well, small-time drug runner Sonny Mann (Timothy Olyphant) slinks back into his hometown in Franklin County, on the Gulf of Mexico; even his dad (Scott Wilson), who runs the local marina, had no idea Sonny was getting out of jail a year early. Sonny intends to make a fresh start, underwritten by the $200,000 his former associates, Fred Vance (William Forsythe) and his nephew, Eddie (Josh Lucas), owe him for taking a fall and keeping quiet. As is invariably the case, collecting on the debt proves easier said than done: The congenitally crooked Vances don't trust anyone who's not interested in entering into a criminal partnership and fob him off with excuses about needing time to get the money together. While they try to figure out what to do about Sonny, he's reacquainting himself with Dave (Josh Brolin) and Ann (Sarah Wynter), his partners in hell-raising, bumming around and aimless adventuring. But their paths diverged long before Sonny got busted, and now Dave is Officer Dave Lockhart and Ann is a nurse, Dave's wife and the mother of two beautiful little girls. Sonny halfheartedly takes up with good-time gal Effie Bender (Angela Bettis), but he clearly still has eyes for Ann. And whatever notions he had about straightening up and flying right fall by the wayside when an late-night explosion intended for him instead kills his father: Sonny declares war on the Vances and follows his heart into Ann's bed, threatening both her marriage and his longtime friendship with Dave. Nunez's Florida is produced by a fragile confluence — equal parts weather, dreams and geography — and in perpetual danger of being swept away. Though he describes this thriller, written in the 1980s and then set aside for more than two decades, as the conclusion to a trilogy that began with RUBY IN PARADISE (1993) and continued in ULEE'S GOLD (1997), the connection is neither plot nor recurring characters but a melancholic, ephemeral sense of place. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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