Fuck farmers. More specifically, fuck American farmers. From top to bottom, they are easily, by leaps and bounds, the most overrated, romanticized, and unjustly flattered group of people who ever lived. Take their success rate. Better yet, their lack of success. At best, one in a thousand make do, while the rest plant, fail, plant again, fail again, then pick up sticks and repeat their losing ways in another county. Usually under cover of darkness. History is littered with a million allegedly sad tales of farmers moving again and again and again, dreams aloft, while they stiff creditors, fuck over communities, beg for money, and, worst of all, destroy the land.
As many a study has proven, the causes of the Great Depression can pretty much be laid at their feet. Using antiquated techniques and ridiculous notions passed down by generations of simpletons, farmers slaughtered millions of acres of prairie and topsoil, all in the name of avoiding actual work. Those who can’t do, teach. Those can do even less, farm. There’s more dignity sucking dick on a street corner.
Which brings us to the Garvey clan. More specifically, Tom Garvey (Mel Gibson). While he walks side by side with Hitler as the least sympathetic human being ever captured on film, he is also stone stupid. Lacking dignity, IQ points, and anything resembling common sense, Tom has chosen farming for the worst reason of all: he doesn’t want to take orders from anyone. Do as he pleases, even if that means putting his wife and children at risk on a minute-by-minute basis. He’s also the world’s worst businessman, repeatedly taking out loans he couldn’t pay back if he lived a hundred lifetimes.
He buys equipment, seed, and tractors, all in service of round-the-clock labor that may – provided there are no storms, hail, floods, droughts, or changes in crop prices – produce a net profit of around ten cents. He’d be better off buying scratch tickets. And yet, despite insisting that he’s his own man, independent and self-sufficient, every living thing he does from sunup to sundown is on someone else’s dime. He’s the biggest welfare queen the cinema has ever seen.
But we’re here for Mae (Sissy Spacek). Riding the wave that inexplicably allowed the Academy to nominate three actresses for “save the farm” films in the same year, (Sally Field and Jessica Lange round it out), Spacek’s popularity and industry standing helped overcome what amounts to a near invisible performance, perhaps the least interesting of her career. When she’s not hovering on the margins, she’s staring into space, perhaps consumed with regret for marrying a maniac who thought nothing of building a homestead next to a river that floods pretty much weekly. But sure, while other wives are hitting the town, she’s endlessly and forever running for sandbags. But we’ll never know what the hell she’s feeling because her screen time is so limited. She may indeed have set the record for minimalism for any Lead Actress nomination. Even Holly Hunter in The Piano had more to say.
Outside of blank looks, frowns, and the occasional smirk, she also manages to pull a thing or two out of the oven, sigh, and grab a kid by the arm. That is, when she’s not collapsing from fatigue. She’s the emptiest vessel in many a moon, when all she had to do is be slightly more sympathetic than her lunatic husband. She is not. There’s a big scene where she gets caught underneath a contraption, but instead of drama, all that’s generated is the hope that she dies under there, sparing her further pain in the most draining marriage of all time. But she survives, and by the next morning, she’s there with buckwheat cakes and ham slices to burn.
Eventually, she does get a break when Tom has to leave to work in a steel mill for extra cash. But instead of using that time to flesh out this woman of mystery, the movie spends damn near every waking second with Tom, if only to show that he’s an even bigger asshole than previously thought. You guessed it, he’s a scab. Who knew Mel Gibson would gleefully be an anti-union strikebreaker.
Maybe 1984 was a lean year at the movies. Perhaps they figured, hey, Spacek won the damn thing only four years prior, so she’s good for ratings, right? Hardly. This was deliberate manipulation on the Academy’s part, pushing an insidious propaganda about sons of the soil that has never even flirted with accuracy. To make matters worse, Tom and Mae reject Joe Wade’s (Scott Glenn) ambitious plan for the valley, which amounts to a dam, cheaper electricity, and hundreds of jobs. Hell, a job for Tom as well! No dice. While this “plan” makes Wade the villain of the piece, he is arguably its hero; a man of guts, insight, and great ambition. But instead of pushing him with the appropriate sympathy, we swing back to the Garveys, who insist on keeping their feet firmly planted in the concrete of 1873. Progress is crushed under the weight of self-righteous fanaticism. It’s enough to make me wish I could travel back in time and set fire to the stage at Farm Aid.
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