The Rain People

Patrick Willems3.5

Honestly did not know James Caan was capable of being this sweet and charming

Lencho of the Apes4.0

Shirley Knight isn't feeling the 'wife and mother' niche that's been mapped out for her, and she runs away from it. She hooks up with a hitchhiker who's no longer able to pull off the performative masculine role he grew up inhabiting, and they share an Easy Rider slash Of Mice And Men road trip, butting up against toxic people who want to reinsert them into the hegemony's narrative (and who aren't able to interact with them on any terms other than those.) Sensitively filmed on an obvious budget, consistent and consistently sublime use of very shallow focus to isolate people against a blurry, abstracted background. Shirley trapped in a phone-booth, all Tippi Hedren and stuff. And an ending that doesn't resolve anything except that the story's over.

Jake Cole4.0

Coppola's films tend to sketch their characters in mythic terms, which makes this mostly astute psychological drama all the more surprising an outlier. Frankly it distantly outpaces Easy Rider as a document of fin du siècle anomie if for no other reason that centering the film on a woman breaking from her domestic doldrums immediately adds dimensions that the more navel-gazing Hopper movie does not have. Natalie's desire to escape responsibility for a man's happiness leads her to attempt to frequently abandon "Killer," the sweet, brain-damaged man she finds herself inadvertently stuck with on her road trip to nowhere. Barring a few moments where Killer speaks a bit too poetically, Caan gives a shockingly rich, underplayed performance, not playing up Killer's condition for sentimental tragedy but rather genuinely portraying the man as a blank slate, an etch-a-sketch who simply allows the insults of the world to splash over him and whose inability to process how mean people are to him naturally makes Natalie increasingly defensive of him even as she contributes to that cruelty. Coppola's impressionistic cross-cutting of memories constantly adds a bittersweet quality to the film, turning even fond remembrances of past passions into harsh complications of present loneliness, exacerbating the film's rich character study with spikes of visual melodramatic sorrow.