Off the Map is a film so in love with the spoken word, it might seem a tad paradoxical that its most effective moments are all basically wordless. There are three essentially silent sequences sprinkled throughout this otherwise language-driven movie, and each time one appears, you can almost hear the audience holding its breath and then exhaling in a collective rush of satisfaction. It's as if these brief respites from all the chatter allow the movie's words to finally sink in, as its characters become real and their emotions finally make that necessary leap from theoretical to purely animal.
The first of these moments is a brilliantly orchestrated voyeurs' daisy chain: a young girl secretly observing a dumbstruck peeper who happens upon her mother standing stark naked and stock still in her garden watching a coyote silently stalking a rabbit. In the second of these dialogue-free and essentially real-time sequences, a confused young man, having just declared his love (somewhat absurdly) for another man's wife, wanders off to ponder the horizon to the equally absurd but also somehow regal strains of Billy Paul's Me and Mrs. Jones. In the third of the wordless sequences around which this proudly wordy film seems to revolve, we simply observe as a man touches his wife's foot, and then, tentatively, kisses her.
Off the Map, directed by Campbell Scott (Rodger Dodger), is one of those movies that critics like to describe as a "small gem," and that's exactly what it is. The film is about a lot of little things and big things and in-between things, all spinning in many different directions at once, and rarely arriving at the place we expect them to. There's not a story per se so much as a series of anecdotes, an accumulation of tiny but telling details that gradually flesh out the characters and allow us to enter their world to a degree not commonly allowed for in most motion pictures.
The film takes the shape of a memory piece, a reeling-in of the years by a grown woman inviting us along as she revisits her childhood in the wilds of New Mexico, circa 1974. In the most broadly described sense, this is a coming-of-age tale – almost inevitably so, since our 12-year-old guide, Bo Groden (Valentina de Angelis), is at an age when new discoveries wait around every corner. But Off the Map is also much more: a grown-up romance, a mystical adventure, a cheerfully dysfunctional comedy, a wistful family drama. That the movie resists being pigeonholed as any one single thing is just one reason its title is so spot on.
Bo is the youngest member of a vaguely bohemian clan living more or less off the land out in the middle of nowhere, without electricity or indoor plumbing, but getting by nicely on wits and pluck. Arlene (Joan Allen, in yet another astonishing performance) is the eccentric earth mama holding the Groden family together, a woman of head and heart who trolls the city dump for useful household items and prefers to do her gardening in the nude. The patriarch here is Charley (Sam Elliott), a huge, silent presence who, for most of the movie, might be more accurately described as an absence. Charley suffers from a clinical depression so monumental it seems to blanket him like one of those angry dark clouds that are always hovering over the heads of certain cartoon characters. His depression is a black hole sucking at the man's vitality and reducing him to hulking muteness – not that the silence is necessarily the worst thing in the world, seeing as how Bo does enough yapping for the entire family, and then some.
As for Bo, she's as memorably self-possessed and old-beyond-her-years as the young protagonist of To Kill a Mockingbird, another movie that filtered its world to fine effect through the eyes of childhood. Bo's a charmer, even when engaging in socially unacceptable behavior like scamming companies for free samples or contemplating a little good-natured identity theft. She walks through her world, a starkly beautiful but isolated place where she sometimes seems to be the only living kid, happily twisting words around in her mind, mentally composing the next letter complaining to some big corporation of imaginary rodent parts discovered in their cupcakes.
And what fine words they are. The Grodens may not have much, but they're full of ideas, imagination and, most of all, words. Bo seems to value nothing so much as a well-turned sentence (lacking even a television set, the Grodens are that rarest of families that actually read to one another for the evening's entertainment), and it's hard not to smile at such big ideas and grand anachronisms like "woeful" emerging from her 12-year-old mouth. Still, it may take a little getting used to the fact that pretty much everybody in Off the Map speaks in this same oddly effected, hyper-articulate way – mom, dad (when he speaks at all), and even William Gibbs (Jim True-Frost), the IRS man who comes knocking on their door one day and then winds up a professional houseguest.
Gibbs is the movie's X-factor, and the catalyst for the transformations that inevitably occur as the film's narrative gathers steam. Even here, though, Off the Map doesn't quite do what we expect it to, and those transformations are communicated in a disarmingly matter-of-fact way, more as part of the story's texture than as some grand destination point. The film is eloquently written but it's not overwritten, with a story that ultimately feels less like a literary construct and more like a spontaneous celebration of a few lived lives (lives that just happen to be fictional). Off the Map makes us genuinely happy to spend time with these people – people who, as the title implies, make contact with the world in new ways, entering it and departing through nexus points rarely noticed – and that's something worth celebrating.
lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Mar 23-29, 2005.