Nosh 163: 'Them That Follow,' 'Maiden' & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Reviews: Them That Follow and Maiden)

Them That Follow

Movie heaven and hell have had many pastors, prophets, priests and preachers (see list below).  Into their ranks comes Lemuel, the Appalachian soul shepherd and snake diviner in Them That Follow. His charismatic spirit comes from actor Walton Goggins. After a little role in Robert Duvall’s The Apostle (1997), the scrawny Alabaman graduated to stellar TV parts in Justified and Vice Principals. There’s something very ’70s about Goggins, both 1870s and 1970s. With his high forehead, laser gaze, blazing grin and slicing voice, he’s like a bantam digest of Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Warren Oates in their yeasty young primes.

Lemuel’s tiny flock lives in a rural outback (lovely in nature, a slum with people). His church is a crude, wooden crib of purified fanaticism with a cold neon cross for greeting. He is very sincerely nuts, loving his flock but insisting that handling poisonous snakes is the true test of faith. His chief follower, Hope, is played with demento devotion by fine British actor Olivia Colman (The Favourite, The Night Manager). With loving lunacy she views her snake-bit son swelling and moaning for a long, hard time (over a hundred preachers of this small, fanged faith are thought to have died from venom). Writer-directors Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage do not cartoon the rubes. Lemuel and Hope are often savvy and caring, but soaked in scriptural notions (Mark 16:18: “They shall take up serpents”) that includes sadistic faith healing. They imagine that Old Satan prefers to hook and torment us through slithering, primeval critters who are pure instinct.  

Earthy, rooted, its tensions coiling and rattling, the movie also employs the familiar soaper elements of a teen pregnancy crisis. Still, the young players (Thomas Mann, Kaitlyn Dever, Lewis Pullman, especially Alice Englert as Lemuel’s confused daughter) approach the level of Goggins and Colman. None of this seems very commercial. The last director to reap serious profit from religious fervor plus snakes was Cecil B. DeMille, at hunky pharaoh Yul Brynner’s  palace in The Ten Commandments. Movingly intimate, Them That Follow blends the chills of the hissing pulp horror Ssssssss with the mad-preacher fevers of John Huston’s Wise Blood.  The main taste is venomized moonshine, but there is also love in the brew.  

Maiden

“The ocean is always trying to kill you,” says Tracy Edwards in Maiden, sounding a dire note soon submerged but not tamed in the vivid nautical documentary by Alex Holmes (Dunkirk, House of Saddam). Anxiety often leaps like dolphins, but here’s the deal: first-time skipper Edwards, 24, and her brave crew of 12 women became the first females to compete in the 33,000-mile Whitbread Round the World Race. Though not winning, the Maiden performed high in its size class and led on two legs of the long route, including the viciously cold, risky voyage from Uruguay past Antarctica to Australia. Edwards lost her dad at 10, then endured an alcoholic stepfather. The angry, hurt teen saved herself by sailing. After being an unhappy cook on very masculine vessels, Edwards found a battered, 58-foot boat and fixed it with her chosen crew of “girls,” who all became exceptionally skillful sea-mates. Principal financing came from sporty King Hussein of Jordan, ruler of a sea-less desert realm who sponsored the ocean trip through … Jordanian Royal Air! After the crew’s first mate bailed during the trials, Edwards skippered and navigated for 167 days at sea.

In this macho-marine world, scoffers included a plum-voiced sailing expert who called  the Maiden a “tin of tarts” (decades later, he admits that the women proved themselves “as men” – give this ass the Commodore Vanderbilt Regatta Snob Award for 1910). Vintage, almost Impressionist footage of the race joins crisp modern interviews of the now middle-aged, engagingly articulate “salts.” The late, seafaring actor Sterling Hayden would have loved this movie, and the fact that five years ago Edwards, now an innovative educator, found the old Maiden rotting in a dock. She uses the restored craft to train young women, including her own grown daughter.  

(Missed my best recent review? Check out below my eager comments on Tarantino's Once Upon at Time ... in Hollywood. Nosh 161 on Aug. 2).    

SALAD (A List)

Excellent Portraits of Priests and Preachers

Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry (Elmer Gantry 1960), Robert Duvall as Sonny Dewey (The Apostle 1997), Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell (Night of the Hunter 1955), Pierre Fresnay as Vincent de Paul (Monsieur Vincent 19478), Walton Goggins as Lemuel (That That Follow 2019), W.G. Fay as Father Tom (Odd Man Out 1947), Claude Laydu as the young priest (Diary of a Country Priest 1951), Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes (Wise Blood 1979), Peter Sellers as Rev. Smallwood (Heavens Above! 1963), Raul Julia as Oscar Romero (Romero 1989), Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan (Boys Town 1938), Montgomery Clift as Father Logan (I Confess 1953) and Robert Morley as Rev. Sayer (The African Queen 1951). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is away this week, busily planning Citizen Trump. It stars John Goodman and a shrill cockatoo trapped at Mar a Lago.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As AIDS-denying, then bravely afflicted Ron Woodruff in Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey lifted his career to major drama and an Oscar, joining such depicters  of the afflicted as Javier  Bardem, The Sea Inside; Nicolas Cage, Leaving Las Vegas; Julie Christie, Afterglow; Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot; Patty Duke, The Miracle Worker; Colin Firth, The King’s Speech; John Hawkes, The Sessions; John Hurt, The Elephant Man; Jessica Lange, Frances; Charles Laughton, The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Peter Mullen, My Name is Joe; Joaquin Phoenix, The Master, and Billy Bob Thornton, Sling Blade. (From the McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club chapter in my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Despite his brimstone temper, Sonny Dewey (Robert Duvall) is Gospel-driven in The Apostle (October Films 1997; director Robert Duvall, d.p. Barry Markowitz).

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