Love Finds A Home (2009)

     Love Finds A Home (2009) (D: Dane Peterson. Sarah Jones, Haylie Duff, Jordan Bridges, Patty Duke] This movie is irritating, and that’s an understatement. The story is quite good, involving family conflict, generational conflict, medical emergency, personal griefs, etc. The setting is a Missouri town sometime in the late 19th century. The main characters are a Belinda, a doctor and Lee her blacksmith husband, plus Lillian their adopted daughter; the doctor’s pregnant friend Annie (also a doctor), the latter’s mother-in-law Mary, an opinionated mid-wife; Josh, the new apprentice to the blacksmith; and assorted secondary characters. So what’s wrong with this movie?
     Plenty. For one thing, the appalling anachronisms, starting with the two women doctors. Women doctors were extremely rare in the late 1800s. The characters generally are imaginary 20th century Americans of a certain type dressed up in 19th century costumes. There’s a scene where the pregnant friend sits in the living room in deshabille while men are present, which violates so many social norms of the time that it’s ludicrous.
     The sets are off kilter in so many ways it’s painful. The doctor’s house is a nice 20th century two-story with a porch and hanging baskets, painted white, in a yard with no visible outbuildings for the horses, or even a chicken coop to house the birds whose clucking signals morning, every morning. The kitchen is, well it ain’t a late 19th century kitchen. The blacksmith and his apprentice are shown “working”, banging on unidentifiable objects made of some metal or other. The town lacks paint, and its dusty ambience indicates the Southwest, not Missouri. Merchants around 1890 would have made a point of painting their false fronted stores in order to impress the customers.
     Then there’s the acting, which is at best intermittently competent. Not that the writing gives the actors much to work with. How many times can a doctor say “I’m a doctor, I know...”? The only one who actually understands her stereotype of a character, and plays it well, is Patty Duke.
     And the music. Intrusive is an understatement. Maybe the producers realised how awful the script was and thought that folksy sentimental tunes would carry the movie where the writing failed.
     The underlying problem is that the producers wanted to make a wholesome “family movie”. They seem to understand that as a movie that leaves out all the bad stuff that mainstream movies include. They don’t include what would have made this an interesting movie, and possibly a good one: the doubts that believers face when they don’t get what they want, when faith seems at best a mild anodyne. There’s a very brief reference to the pains of childbirth as the punishment for Eve’s role in the Fall, with a hint of disagreement with that reading of Genesis. It’s not followed up. The blurb says “...Belinda [the doctor] looks to a higher power...”, which indicates the producers’ aims. That higher power shows up in a pastor who appears at odd intervals to dispense bromides, three prayers, and four or five references to God. Religion and faith, and the doubts and conflicts that mark a life of faith, are simply not present in the story, let alone integrated into it. Yet the few hints show that faith is supposed to be essential to the characters. Why the almost total absence of a defining trait of the characters, of the essence of the story? Was it because a “family movie” mustn’t trigger questions of the kind that adults don’t want their children to ask? That’s my suspicion.
     You can’t make even mediocre art if your focus is on “values” rather than story and character. ½