THE SPITFIRE GRILL
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Alison Elliott, Ellen Burstyn, Marcia Gay Harden, Will Patton, Kieran Mulroney. Screenplay: Lee David Zlotoff. Director: Lee David Zlotoff. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
The notoriously sap-averse Hollywood insiders at this year's Sundance Film Festival went absolutely nuts over THE SPITFIRE GRILL, resulting in a bidding war which found Castle Rock paying a head-spinning $10 million to distribute an independent film. Maybe they smelled a female-appeal hit like FRIED GREEN TOMATOES; maybe they liked the idea of countering the Hollywood filth-monger mentality by supporting a film produced by clergy; maybe, just maybe, they were genuinely touched by the story. Whatever the reason, they have themselves a film which doesn't just jerk tears -- it slaps, kicks, pinches and pleads for them. THE SPITFIRE GRILL may be positive and uplifting, but it is so aggressive in the pursuit of your sympathy that it becomes exhausting.
THE SPITFIRE GRILL stars Alison Elliott as Percy Talbott, a young woman just released after five years in a Maine prison and looking for a fresh start in life. That search brings her to the small town of Gilead, where she goes to work at The Spitfire Grill for Hannah Ferguson (Ellen Burstyn), a feisty widow recovering from a hip injury. Hannah has been trying -- unsuccessfully -- to sell the grill for many years, which leads Percy to suggest an essay/raffle contest to give it away. Most of the townspeople are suspicious of Percy's motives, including Hannah's nephew Nahum (Will Patton), but Percy still manages to make some unlikely friends, including Nahum's timid wife Shelby (Marcia Gay Harden) and a mysterious figure who lives in the woods. Still, it is difficult for Percy to escape a past which she is reluctant to discuss but which Nahum is intent on discovering.
On its most basic level, THE SPITFIRE GRILL is yet another in a long line of films about benevolent strangers who teach intransigent folks a lesson in tolerance, and again the lead character is perhaps the most troubled, but not really the character who grows and changes. Alison Elliott is the best thing about THE SPITFIRE GRILL, a talented young actress who turns in strong and emotional work as Percy, a woman who is just as unable to forgive herself as others are to forgive her. She is the sympathetic core of the film, and we grow to care about whether she will be able to find redemption. Unfortunately, we never get to see her experience that redemption, and it is something of a cheat. It is never nearly as important to us that Hannah makes peace with her demons, or that Nahum learns to be accepting, or that any particular person ends up with the grill, but those are the only scraps we are tossed to give THE SPITFIRE GRILL any sense of consequence.
In place of consequence, writer/director Lee David Zlotoff provides a film which often feels like a string of feel-good cliches, scored by James Horner, the master of feel-good cliche music. Zlotoff never misses the opportunity to send out scenes like tear-seeking missiles, scenes which might have been effective individually but en masse serve only to batter you insensible. For the record, THE SPITFIRE GRILL includes an abusive husband to boo, a story about an abusive stepfather to feel outraged over, a story about a troubled Vietnam veteran to feel sorry for, three different stories about lost children to sob over, three different wrenching tales from the essay contest to sob over some more, one mother-and-child reunion to sob over still more, a wedding proposal to feel warm and fuzzy over, a funeral oration for moral uplift and a scene of a once near-catatonic man emerging into the sunlight to provoke unintentional snickers. If my description seems cruelly cynical, it is only because THE SPITFIRE GRILL numbs you with its pathos. In its own way, it is just as shallow as an action film which is just one explosion after another.
The story goes that THE SPITFIRE GRILL was "commissioned" by a collective of Catholic priests who wanted to back a film with "positive human values," and I suppose you could say that they got what they ordered. Everyone in Gilead eventually Does the Right Thing, and it is the kind of film which will probably end up on Bob Dole's Hit Parade. But in the course of injecting those human values, Lee David Zlotoff didn't bother to inject many human beings -- Gilead, Maine and nearly everyone in it (particularly the terminally irrascible Hannah) seems plucked from a Pepperidge Farm commercial. Alison Elliott's performance is strong enough that, for a while, you might think THE SPITFIRE GRILL is about something, but it isn't about people whose troubles make you emotional. It's more of an endurance contest between you and your supply of facial tissues.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 bombs in Gilead: 4.
Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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