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Daltry Calhoun

2005, Movie, PG-13, 100 mins

Daltry Calhoun: Review

DALTRY CALHOUN
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First-time writer and director Katrina Holden Bronson's unfocused fable about a teenager who is abruptly reunited with her long-lost daddy contains a couple of lovely scenes that are all but smothered by a shambling mess of self-conscious eccentricity. Fourteen years ago, small-time pot dealer Daltry Calhoun (Johnny Knoxville) was living in a shack belonging to his late mother's cousin several-times-removed, Dee (Beth Grant), in some squalid Appalachian holler with his 15-year-old girlfriend, May (Elizabeth Banks), and their squalling baby, June. Fed up with Daltry's nonsense, Dee sends him packing as May weeps inconsolably. Daltry, we later learn, spent years searching for enlightenment before discovering the Zen of golf, and eventually landed in small, picture-perfect Ducktown, Tennessee, and brought his horticultural skills to bear on legal grass, building Calhoun Industries on high-quality, locally grown hybrid sod. As the movie opens, Daltry has thoroughly reinvented himself as the local hero who saved Ducktown's economy and a regional celebrity via his starring role in a series of goofball TV ads. Those same ads bring May and June (Sophie Traub, whose accent wanders dramatically) back into his life; May is dying from some strain of old-movie disease and wants Daltry to assume responsibility for June's education. Daltry is more than happy to do this even though — unbeknownst to anyone but his lawyers — Calhoun Industries is on the verge of bankruptcy because a spontaneous seed mutation is producing rudely phallic eruptions on what should be flawlessly manicured lawns. June, a brainy, self-taught musician who claims she can play any instrument by ear but only ever actually plays the harmonica, hopes to attend the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. May insists that Daltry not tell June he's her father and she doesn't see fit to tell him — or June — that she's terminally ill, though we know via June's insistent voice-over, which looks back from some unspecified future vantage point. Further complicating Daltry's life are Australian sod specialist Frankie (Kick Gurry), hot-to-trot widowed shopkeeper Flora Flick (Juliette Lewis) and illiterate, mentally challenged groundskeeper Doyle (David Koechner). The story lurches back and forth between Daltry's redemption and June's extremely awkward coming-of-age; secondary characters disappear for long stretches of time and scenes pile up haphazardly without ever coalescing into a coherent story. The soundtrack, which ranges from Johnny Cash to Serge Gainsbourg to the Wu-Tang Clan, is admirably eclectic but can't be said to pull things together. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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