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The Rising Place

2002, Movie, PG-13, 93 mins

The Rising Place: Review

RISING PLACE, THE
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Sticky sweet sentimentality, clumsy plotting and a rosily myopic view of life in the WWII-era Mississippi Delta undermine this adaptation of an unpublished novel by David Armstrong. According to our narrator, Virginia Wilder (Frances Fisher), a "rising place" is a once-in-a-lifetime moment of truth during which priorities reveal themselves and the future suddenly becomes clear. For Virginia, that moment comes one Christmas holiday, when she returns to her Mississippi hometown to visit her mother, Ruth (Frances Sternhagen), and ailing Aunt Millie (Alice Drummond). While rummaging through a closet, Virginia comes across that old standby of drippy, time traveling dramas: a box of letters. They belong to Aunt Millie, and as Virginia tears through the ribbon-wrapped bundles with little regard for her aunt's privacy, we're transported back to rural Mississippi in the days shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — a gentle place where the weather is always fair and the only noticeable inconvenience in being black is segregated seating at the local cafe. We meet a young, single and quite pregnant Millie — or "Emily," as she was known in her younger days — who's eagerly awaiting news of her boyfriend Harry, an expert flier who's been sent to a special-alert camp somewhere on the East Coast. Emily lives with her stern father (Gary Cole) and somewhat more understanding mother (Tess Harper), and plans to marry Harry once he returns home, but her scandalous condition — as well as her close friendship with Wilma Watson (Elise Neal), a young black woman — has made Emily something of a pariah. When word from Harry finally arrives, it comes in the form of a Dear Jill letter, and Emily must come to terms with the fact that she and her unborn baby are on their own in a world that's about to go to war. Once the letters run out, Millie herself takes over narrating her story, but the film never achieves the focus it so desperately needs. The characters are as generic as they are forgettable, and writer-director Tom Rice never captures the crucial flavor of his locale. While few places in the United States were as filled with dramatic tension as the Deep South during the infancy of the Civil Rights movement, Rice presents it as a place where racism is a matter of a few neighborhood bullies, and the only thing thicker than the kudzu are all the down-home clichés. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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