Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 23-January-11
Spoiler Rating: High

Sommersby (1993)

The Reconstruction-era drama Sommersby has two themes which I especially like: (1) a man returning home after a war, and (2) someone assuming a new identity in a time before Social Security numbers, photo IDs, and fingerprinting pinned down individuals like bugs on cardboard. I like the thought of a person both finding and defining his place in the world, and unusual cases of this often yield good tales.

The person who does the finding and defining here is Jack Sommersby, or at least someone who calls himself Jack Sommersby and looks a lot like the real thing. (He is played by Richard Gere.) Jack returns to a Southern village after a six-year absence during which he was assumed dead in the Civil War. The first person to see him doesn't recognize him, but after the (re)introductions the whole community turns out to welcome him back. He is led in procession to his doorstep, where his wife Laurel (Jodie Foster) greets him with coolness. Clearly some painful history lies between them, and when they retire that night after a homecoming hootenanny she reminds him that they sleep in different rooms.

Foster isn't the first actress one thinks of for heaving-bosom romance, but Sommersby can be described as such and she acquits herself nicely. Over the ensuing weeks Laurel softens to Jack because he is kind to their son, magnanimous to their neighbors, and tenderly passionate to herself. What happened to the hard-drinking, hard-hitting lout she married? As they frolic in bed or set about rebuilding the town, Laurel lives a fantasy: she keeps the one thing that was right about her husband — an electric sexual attraction — and watches the bad things replaced by the qualities of an upstanding man. (And a forward-thinking one too, willing to accept the equality of former slaves … although that doesn't please everyone around them.)

Yet even before photo IDs and all that, assuming a new identity could be risky business. After a year of bliss Jack's past comes back to haunt him, aided by a push from a rival (Bill Pullman) who wanted to marry Laurel when she was believed to be a widow. Jack is faced with a difficult choice: declaring that he is not Jack Sommersby, which would brand his neighbors as suckers, Laurel as a slut, and their new baby as a bastard; or insisting that he is Jack Sommersby, which would make him a convicted murderer. The courtroom scene in which he and Laurel argue these options is ludicrous but moving. Among the impostors in this month's Jujube Spotlight series,* Jack is the only one whose self-fashioning was a deliberate act of resurrection, even atonement, to the point where nothing is more important to him. This doesn't diminish the romantic aspect of the story (i.e., by making his love for Laurel appear second to his narcissism). Rather, it creates a potent form of romance in which love is the centerpiece of an identity that gives a man's life its meaning.

*See the Index by date for a list of other films in this month's series.

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