San Francisco International Film Festival 20 April - 04 May 2006

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There are, from time to time, certain films that open a cinematic door, reveling an American region, altogether real and new. This debut work by Jack Fisk is one of those works, creating a vivid portrait of a Texas small town, during the wartime ’40s, when the lives of its inhabitants were like forgotten fauna, thriving on the imaginary needs of a faraway conflict. Raggedy Man’s heroine is a young woman, Nita, who works as a telephone operator in a prairie town, living only with her two little boys. Nita’s husband, apparently a woman-chaser accustomed to long sprints, had deserted her four years before. Her lonely existence is borne with exasperation, but her employer convinces her that Nita’s job is one of wartime necessity, a governmentally “frozen” position. She is prepared to muddle through this immobile period of her life, devoted to her children, without immediate concerns outside her milieu. However, life in the dreary town gradually crowds in, changing Nita’s self-exile with unpredictable distress. First of all, there are the Triplett brothers, two physically violent layabouts who can only think of Nita as a prospective sexual victim. There is Teddy, a young sailor on leave, who drifts into the lives of Nita and her sons by chance—an emblem of the war and the freshness of youth existent only in distant places; a survivor of the tragic messages received daily on the switchboard. Then there is Bailey, a mysterious, ragged vagrant, hovering silently around the town doing odd jobs: a tattered ghost of Tom Joad. Nita’s confrontations with these people become brilliant episodes that illuminate the talents of a superb cast. Sissy Spacek breathes life into her portrait of Nita with a mixture of pensive melancholy and maternal ferocity. She is a creature on the edge of life, ready to leap into a dreamt-of future. Eric Roberts’ Teddy is an unforgettable characterization, fulfilling the promise of his work in Paul’s Case—a boy-man baffled by the torment of love; and as the Tripletts, William Sanderson and Tracey Walter are right out of Faulkner’s dark, Southern world, subtle miscreants of evil: prairie sharks beyond reason. Raggedy Man captures, through its images, too, the bright anonymity of “outback” America, touched with drama by Jerry Goldsmith’s evocative music. We stare, like surprised explorers, at these odd, American places with deceptively welcome, non-Texas names like Edna and Gregory.

—Albert Johnson

Copyright © 2006 San Francisco Film Society