Product: Doc Hollywood [VHS] (1991)
Rating: 4.0
Small Town Values
Spoilers below!This is a wonderful movie, with a great cast, fine acting, nice cinematography, and a satisfying plot. Fox, Warner, Fonda, and Harrelson are all wonderful in their roles, as are the supporting players. I want to say that up front because I have some critical things to say about the mind set behind the film.So many of the actors in this film have played Northern roles that I often expect one of them to blurt out, "Can't get theyah from heeya." The script has fun with typical stereotypes; the worst redneck in the film, Woody Harrelson, only wants to sell the city boy insurance (which, funnily, might be worse than a beating). This may be the Deep South, but it's a Hollywoodized version that contains illiteracy and pigs and a squash parade on the one hand and a woman who's studying for the bar plus mechanics who know their way around the insides of a vintage Porsche on the other. In the end, despite the trappings, Grady is really Small Town, Anywhere. And that serves the movie's purpose well, since what we learn from Ben Stone's sojourn in Grady is that many of us yearn for our culture's small town roots, where everyone knows everyone else, where the doctor makes house calls and the nice lady at the breakfast joint knows what each of her patrons wants without being told. We like to have this side of our nature petted and stroked by movies even though, as a society, we have frantically voted and bought our way toward having the exact opposite kind of country. (Where would WalMart fit into the lives of Gradyites? MacDonald's? We aren't told.) A movie like this, with the kind of values it supposedly emphasizes, can make us forget the choices we've made that have all but extinguished many of the Gradys in America.Watch for a scene right out of Local Hero in which Fox listens to the weather forecast for Grady on his phone while looking out on LA city lights. The parallels are too obvious, even so far as both Mac and Ben driving Porsches. Local Hero might be seen as the pattern for this film, but with more of an ambiguous ending, and it is a bit more pragmatic about our chances of living the kind of life valued in Doc Hollywood; we don't know whether Mac ever makes it back to that tiny Scottish hamlet, whereas we get our dose of comfort at the climax of this film when Ben makes the "right" choice in the end. So we do feel good after watching this movie, and for most folks that's what movies are for. But do the values portrayed in the film make us want to preserve the Gradys and Bedford Falls we seemingly long for?