For a moment, Main Street runs perilously close to being a razor sharp satire about a bunch of simple hard-working lower middle-class folk who cheat a major corporation out of some money using a cunning strategy of ignorance and guilt. It feels, for the duration of its second act, like there’s a great comedy lying in wait beneath the film’s otherwise flawed visage, but in the end, it unfolds predictably and with nothing really learned or accomplished. There’s no satisfying pay-off, just a bit of closure that leaves you wondering what the point of the whole affair was meant to be. Did all of that happen just so we could get a simple lesson about being true to our roots? If so, that lesson is horribly muddled and anything else Horton Foote, the screenwriter of To Kill a Mockingbird, wrote into the film is eroded by a bunch of people overacting with southern accents with embellishments that would fit better in a Tennessee Williams stageplay than they do a film.
The finances of the Carr estate aren’t what they used to be in the heyday of the tobacco industry; things have gotten so bad that Georgianna (Ellen Burstyn), whose father built a tobacco empire in some warehouses across town, had begun to seriously consider selling off the house in which she was born and raised in. Luckily, such a rash action is delayed by the arrival of Mr. Leroy (Colin Firth) who rents out the Carrs’ warehouses so that his environmental company, ESC, can use it as a hazardous waste storage unit during transfer from a plant in Louisiana to a dump in Texas. The presence of the new hazardous waste business in their small North Carolina town sparks a bit of public intrigue as Georgianna’s niece (Patricia Clarkson) pushes to have the ESC contract with the warehouses revoked, even as the town council gets excited over the potential income such a business could bring the town. Off to the side of that story is a police officer (Orlando Bloom), trapped in the town due to his obligation to his mother (Margo Martindale), who has to sit by and watch as the girl he’s loved since high school (Amber Tamblyn) stumbles through a bad relationship and attempts to run away to Atlanta.
There are no especially good performances here, with even the typically reliable Margo Martindale bordering on melodrama and the superb Isiah Whitlock Jr. being underused as the town’s Mayor. Instead, the bulk of the film is given over to an emotionless Bloom, an overacting Burstyn, and Firth who spends the entire film trying to figure out what a Texas accent sounds like. Burstyn might be the guiltiest of the three, but she gets no help from a script that’s so utterly incompetent in its suitability for the screen that you can’t help but think it should never be performed in any other medium than as really bad public theater.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
A quick production featurette offers a behind-the-scenes look at Main Street, but otherwise the only extras are the basics like deleted scenes and the film’s trailer.
"Main Street" is on sale November 15, 2011 and is rated PG. Drama. Directed by John Doyle. Written by Horton Foote. Starring Amber Tamblyn, Colin Firth, Ellen Burstyn, Orlando Bloom, Patricia Clarkson.
