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by Frank Wilkins

Sunshine State is a pirate movie. Not in the sense of the early-exploration type peg-legged buccaneers with eye-patches, swash-buckling swords and cackling parrots. But more in the sense of blueprint wielding, bull-dozer driving land grubbers looking for the next ocean-front plot of land to over-build with retirement homes and assisted living centers. Not really much difference in the two except that the former lived more by a code of ethics – an honor among thieves, if you will.

Writer/director John Sayles brings us a multi-character piece filled with brilliant and engaging dialogue. The story weaves itself amongst the lives of the inhabitants of a fictional Florida town, DelRona Beach, who are faced with the quandary of holding on to their roots or giving in to economic development. The characters are always talking about how things used to be back in the day, and the developers are looked upon as pirates by the town's inhabitants which is fitting for the locale as the Northern Florida fan base of the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers. In a clever artistic device used throughout the movie, Sayles peppers the film with pirate imagery and buccaneer references.

Sayles introduces us to the characters with a soap-opera like cadence, seducing us just long enough to begin to savor the narrative before plunging us back into another character. We first learn of town tart Marly Temple (Edie Falco), manager of a seaside motel and former Weekie Watchee performer, who serves as the central focus of the story as she carries out her father's wishes of refusing to sell-out to the buzzard-like developers. Her current boyfriend is preparing to leave for the PGA tour so she shacks up with the enemy – Jack Meadows (Timothy Hutton) a nice landscape architect and member of the development team. Edie delivers a marvelous performance but I'm wondering if she is becoming typecast as the tough yet sensitive Carmella Soprano on HBO's The Sopranos. I kept waiting for her to break out of character and slip back into her New Jersey Italian accent. I'm sure she hates to hear this, but I'm more comfortable seeing her as the mob matriarch.

Desiree Perry (Angela Bassett) returns to the nearby but equally affected community of Lincoln Beach, from her self-imposed exile after becoming pregnant to the local football star at the age of fifteen. She has made a wonderful life for herself, married a prominent doctor, and is reluctant to come home not having spoken to her mother much during her absence. The black community of Lincoln Beach shares in the same struggle as the inhabitants of DelRona Beach, but as we learn from the vocal leader of Lincoln Beach, Dr. Elton Lloyd (Bill Cobbs) the blacks approach the problem from a different angle, having experienced the Jim Crow laws of earlier generations. Angela Bassett's performance seemed distant and inattentive, as if paralleling her character in the movie, not wanting to really be a part of the goings-on.

Mary Steenburgen plays the wife of the suicidal local commissioner. She is the civic leader of the community and is charged with heading up the Annual Buccaneer Days Festival designed to bolster local morale and lend a sense of civic pride to the snow-bird community. Her former beauty queen-like southern accent is spot on as gives probably the best performance of the lot. Probably not too much of a reach for her though as she hails from Arkansas. I actually felt sorry for her character as she upholds her dignity in the face of poor attendance and lack of interest in the festival.

We learn of many more layers of the story and are introduced to scores of more characters as we delve deeper into the hearts and souls of the inhabitants of the community. As a kind of narrative device, we meet Murray Silver (Alan King) and Buster Bidwell (Clifton James), two ultra-conservative members of a golf foursome who hail progress and cash in on the heartbreak of the poor saps who must sell their properties for pennies on the dollar. Sayles obviously picks a side in the economic battle and in a kind of "you get what you deserve" payback scene, we see these old codgers hitting from the mud at the edge of a water hazard as their golf game begins to fall apart.

Sunshine State is about the storytelling and the characters. The subject matter itself is not really all that engaging and isn't very interesting to me, but Sayles puts it all together in a sort of way that makes you want to see it out. None of the threads are quite tied up, yet we get a satisfying resolution to the story at the end of the movie. Although it's a story with a political message, Sayles doesn't beat us down with the theme. The political aspect just acts as another character and gives something for everyone to carry on about.

Frank Wilkins

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Screen formats: Widescreen 1.85:1

Subtitles: English, French, Closed Captioned

Sound: English (Dolby Digital 5.0)

Other Features: Color; interactive menus; scene access; director's commentary; trailers.


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Complete Cast:

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