Pointless degradation

Rating: 6/10 (7 February 2004)

There are good moments and scenes in this film: when the lovers eventually get together, when Ruby gives the farm the once-over, when deserters and farm women share a small hoedown, and when Inman carefully shares a bed with a woman who has lost her husband. For the most part, though, the movie moves from pointless gore to meaningless degradation, scene after scene. I understand very well that there are times and places in which that's what life mostly is. And if this movie were an exception to an overload of happy films, who could object? But it is not. It is simply the dramatization of suffering for the purpose of making the rich richer. And we already have plenty of that.