THE YEARLING
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1998 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): **
"I never shot a deer before, Daddy," Jody Baxter (Wil Horneff), a young teenage boy, says as he cries profusely. He's got to shoot it because his dad (Peter Strauss) was just bitten by a big rattlesnake, and they need the heart of the deer as medication for his father's wounds. Out in the backwoods where they live, his daddy may soon be a goner.
1994's THE YEARLING uses exaggerated hillbilly accents that probably worked in the 1946 original, but in the new version they seem like put-ons. Typical of the tired dialog has the boy asking his father, "Pa, am I a man now?" since he has killed his first deer.
The story is set in about 1920, but, except for the dates on the headstones of the family's dead children and the appearance of a few cars when they venture into town, the time frame seems more like the 1880s.
The story contains all of the elements of an old fashioned backwoods tale. The wild animals are everywhere. Besides the snake, the story even includes a big killer bear that almost gets them when the father's old gun jams.
The boy adopts the young fawn of the first deer he kills and brings it home to live like a pet dog in their small cabin. It is a cute little thing, who gets into her share of mischief such as trashing their house and destroying their crop. Amazingly, although the deer is clearly the best part of the movie, she appears very little.
The picture uses lush cinematography and natural disasters to show off the family's hardships. Unfortunately the story, a relatively disconnected series of incidents none of which are particularly compelling, works only in brief spurts.
Not a happy lot, the people fret over something in the majority of the scenes, what with wild animals, bad weather, poverty, death, hunger, etc. You almost want to shout at them to lighten up a little, surely they have some things to be thankful for.
When they come across a dead kill, where the bear has only eaten a little and left, the father remarks in disgust, "That's why I hate a bear. You look right in their face, and they got no remorse." So he expected wild animals to have guilty consciences?
Their neighbors are cliches of simple folk. The poorly drawn and exaggerated characters drink whiskey from jugs, have IQs way south of 100, and look like they haven't bathed in a month of Sundays -- make that twelve months.
I haven't seen the original since childhood so I cannot be sure that it is better, but I expect it must be.
The movie only comes into its own in its manipulative but effective tearjerker ending.
THE YEARLING runs 1:30. It is rated PG, but should have been PG-13, for violence, blood and death and would be appropriate for kids about nine and up.
My son Jeffrey, almost 9, thought the film was only "pretty good." He complained that it had too much crying and too much blood and frequently did not make sense. He said he has seen a lot better movies and gives this one only a marginal recommendation. He did like all of animals in it.
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