3412 Sweet Land
Tonight we went to see Sweet Land at the Grandview Drexel. That's my third movie in three weeks--twice to see Dream Girls and then this low budget indy which has been slowly building in popularity since its release in 2005. It is based on a 1989 short story by Will Weaver. "A Gravestone Made of Wheat" and is about a Norwegian immigrant farmer in southwestern Minnesota who receives a mail-order bride from Norway, only to discover she's a German who had recently moved to Norway. It is not a "Hollywood" product, and is a beautiful love story of Olaf and Inge as they struggle against the community's prejudice and the moral standards of that era.The movie begins with Inge's death as an old woman in the 80s, reflects back to the Viet Nam era when Olaf dies, and then starts over with them as young strangers who fall in love around 1920. They encounter prejudice and suspicion in Olaf's strongly Lutheran Norwegian community (it takes place shortly after WWI) and can't marry because her papers are not in order.
Although it's an exceptionally well done film with a wonderful love story and beautiful photography depicting lush farmland and warm friendships, I can't help wondering if there will ever be a film made for commercial release that depicts Christians or even Americans in a positive light? The rural Minnesotan Lutheran congregation insists on speaking only English, even though many of them know Norwegian and the pastor can speak German. As I've come to expect in any film or TV production, everyone but the Christians exhibit Christ's love. There is one very minor character who appears at the beginning and the end whose heart is in the right place--he's of course, an outspoken Socialist.
Inge and Olaf's love story starts and ends with war--WWI and VietNam. The land struggle shows the two of them, both immigrants, harvesting acres of corn by hand, pitted against the modern age of machine farming just developing as farm markets inflated by the war collapse. Yes, and the big, bad commercial interests gobbling up the little guys--and the banker is a relative, a Lutheran sharing the pew on Sunday with the man whose farm he'll auction on Monday.
In what must be the tiniest of sub-plots, there are even two Native Americans, probably from a near-by reservation, helping the banker displace the farmer with 9 children about to be auctioned off his land. The director, Ali Selim, is of Arab parentage doing a xenophobia film when suspicion of Arabs is high, and it's a carbon neutral film (for environmentalists). Ah, the feelgoodiness of it. Oh, it's a good story, absolutely, a story of love and overcoming, and change as the community eventually comes to their aid, but sometimes I just get so tired. . .
Sweet Land
movie reviews
Ali Selim
MinnesotaSource URL: https://maryelizabeth-winstead.blogspot.com/2007/01/3412-sweet-land-tonight-we-went-to-see.html
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