Palmetto
1998, Color
Directed by Volker Schlondorff
I was really looking forward to seeing "Palmetto". I grew up in Bradenton, across the Manatee River from the real Palmetto, and was there until I came to Pittsburgh, and I remember them filming bits of the movie around town while I was there. Palmetto is an utterly boring, ugly town, so I didn't really think any movie set there would amount to much, but figured that with talent like Volker Schlondorff, Woody Harrelson, and Elisabeth Shue, Hollywood might be able to do something decent. If not, I thought I might still enjoy seeing some familiar scenery. I was wrong. It was a waste of $6.50.
I actually enjoyed the humor in the first half of the movie; it made Harrelson's character a lot more human and realistic. Scenes like the one where goes down the wrong way in the hallway of the courthouse, or the one where he has trouble getting rid of the typewriter make his character more believable. I think the movie would have worked much better if it had stuck to comedy instead of bogging down in trying to squeeze film noir out of a noir-less setting. Florida in places like Palmetto is more laughable than it is mysterious. It's full of old people on tricycles, everything's tacky and garish, there are condos all over the place, and IQ is painfully low. Suspense? No way.
Most of the movie's problems lie in its screenplay. Not only is the setting unbelievable, but the plot is so contrived that it becomes increasingly disappointing as it unfolds, finally reaching its nadir at the completely unsatisfying conclusion. As the plot sinks, so does the dialogue and characterization. The characters become increasingly cartoonish. One, in what I thought was the most confusing sequence in the movie, is shot by a police officer while running along a beach. In the next scene he's still running, through something like a swamp (how the hell he got from the beach to a swamp, I don't know), then he's driven to the courthouse, then somehow makes his way out to someone's estate, where he gets the crap beat out of him, but keeps bouncing up, ready for more. It was like something out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Reviewers' comparisons to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? are well-founded. There are also numerous things that didn't make sense, for example, how did whoever dragged the typewriter out of the river know where it was? Why was there seaweed in it? Why didn't Harrelson's character just tell the cop that there wasn't a spare tire? Why didn't he copy the tapes? Why did he let his girlfriend listen to the sex on them? and so on... I can believe that an investigative reporter can have trouble lighting a match, but some of his blunders are just too much- things that anyone with common sense wouldn't do.
Finally, I didn't enjoy seeing the footage shot in my town- it bothered me too much that Hollywood was just making stuff up. I'm sure most people don't care, but I at least have to point out that there aren't any beaches in Palmetto. Just lots of marsh. What was totally believable is that Harrelson's character took so many risks in order to get money to leave town. I know exactly how he felt.
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Evan Beach beach@cmu.edu
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