Review

Review Date: 28-July-02
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Sunshine State (2002)

I am happy to say that this may be the most incomplete Jujube review to date. In my desire to spare you a laborious treatise on all of the characters, themes, and common threads in John Sayles' Sunshine State, I am going to focus on what I believe is the most prominent and interesting concept. But there's much more to the picture, which is a rich panoply of compelling, occasionally intersecting stories in the best John Sayles fashion. It would take multiple viewings to really get one's arms around this film — which is good news for movie fans and a good excuse for me, writing this review after only one screening.

First, a general outline of Sunshine State, which is not, as previously reported (based on the trailer and press releases), strictly a story about a small Florida town fighting against development. The action centers on two women: Marly (Edie Falco), the feisty proprietress of a long-established seaside motel and restaurant, and Desiree (Angela Bassett), who returns to the home she fled as a teenager seeking reconciliation with her mother (Mary Alice) and her past. Marly's part of the story is fleshed out by her equally feisty father (the excellent Ralph Waite), her bohemian mother (Jane Alexander), and romantic interests both old (Marc Blucas) and new (Timothy Hutton). Desiree's tale involves not only her mother, but also her kind husband (James McDaniel), a tragic young cousin (Alex Lewis), an old flame (Tom Wright), and a wise old doctor (Bill Cobbs), who does, in fact, attempt to mount a protest against developers who want to turn the town into a mass of upscale stores, townhouses, and hotels. Against the backdrop of this threat and the town's annual Buccaneer Days, organized by a nervous twit named Francine (Mary Steenburgen), the characters confront and illuminate their connection to the past, their need for community, and their inability to stem the bittersweet progress of society. Oh, and did I mention there's also a Greek chorus of golf players, which includes a wry and amusing Alan King?

While Sunshine State deals with much more than a community imperiled by modern capitalistic development, this is the starting point for the film's principal theme of progress. Until recently, I think that word always carried a positive overtone; "progress" was understood to mean man's evolution toward a new way of life that promised to benefit just about everybody. Nowadays you will occasionally hear "progress" used with a tone of suspicious irony to mean a new system or technology that may benefit a few people in the know, but will probably confuse or injure everyone else or harm the environment. Sayles' view of "progress" follows this latter definition, but is more broad and incisive — and, in a way, more bleak. The film seems to point out that what is considered good for one person or group of people is invariably considered bad for another group, person, or the natural world in which we live; consequently, while people will never stop seeking new ways to improve their lives, there is no such thing as universal progress.

In the social sphere, this notion is primarily expressed by the two old timers, Marly's father, Furman Temple, and Desiree's friend, Dr. Lloyd. Both men lament — though from very different and in some ways opposite perspectives — that civil rights and its distant ancestor, political correctness, have actually harmed society. In a riveting scene that begins with a close-up of his grizzled face, Furman argues that the modern habit of sorting society into special-interest groups demanding recognition and acceptance has reduced the general populace's chances of success. In his day, everyone started out with a hard road ahead of him, regardless of his color, family, or handicaps; if a man made something of himself, he did it through personal integrity, grit, and hard work. Now, suggests Furman, a man gets ahead by allying himself with the right group, playing by its rules, and crying discrimination if he doesn't get the respect he thinks he deserves. The individual has been debased and subsumed. Dr. Lloyd also debunks one of the modern social "advancements" when he compares opportunities for blacks in the 1930s and '40s with their opportunities today. Shut out of the white areas of town, blacks once carved out a thriving community for themselves which began to disappear with the advent of civil rights. Now, though they have gained the right to eat, live, and socialize in the same places as whites, they generally do so in the bottom layers of society. We were kept out of white restaurants, he says; now we can flip burgers in them.

In the environmental sense, although the movie depicts the developers as greedy semi-villains, the case is made that maintaining a mutually beneficial balance between man's needs and nature's is impossible, at least at this point in time. Human progress, in terms of the growing population, cannot readily be stopped, and people have the right to live and try to make their dreams come true. Who can say for sure where the line is between their obligation to the world at large and their obligation to themselves? For Marly, a sympathetic and intelligent heroine, the decision of whether to sell her motel to the developers is personal; she needs to let it go to set herself free, and this takes precedence over any responsibility she has to the town or the environment. (Similarly, Desiree's determination not to sell out to the developers results from a personal wish to preserve her newly rediscovered past, rather than a commitment to save the coastline.) For Marly's love interest, a landscape architect, manipulating nature to accommodate urban growth is the key to maintaining both scenic beauty and livability. And although preservation of the ibis is important to Marly's mother, she nevertheless hopes to make a good profit off of the development as she approaches widowhood and retirement. The Alan King character concludes, with nostalgia but no resentment, that there are no magical frontiers left on Earth for man to explore and exploit — so we ought to colonize the moon. None of these characters is portrayed as entirely close-minded or selfish; they simply illustrate that people's need to find contentment and fulfillment using the surroundings and opportunities available to them is as natural, and as inexorable, as the tides.

A notion of death haunts Sunshine State — the hinted illness of Desiree's mother, the largely comic suicide attempts of one of the secondary characters, the building of a coffin, and the timely discovery of an Indian burial ground — which lends perspective to the the film's themes of community and history, as well as history's twin sister, progress. We may take different, constantly changing paths as both individuals and societies, but in the end our strivings bring us to the same place. The most we can do while we live is accept that mankind is constantly advancing, for better or for worse, and try to adapt as best we can. As old Furman Temple tells Desiree's young cousin, you can't fight the undertow, you just have to go with it.

Copyright © 2002 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.