35/100
Orphan-kickin’ time! Cane River’s focus on colorism (as distinct from racism) and the weight of historical legacy, as refracted through mutually hostile Louisiana communities that aren’t so much underrepresented onscreen as just plain not represented at all, makes Jenkins’ first and only feature (he died shortly afterwards) plenty valuable even before you learn that it was considered lost for over 30 years, resurfacing only in 2013. I’m glad that it still exists, happy that I was able to see it, and deeply sorry to report that as a film qua film, it’s kind of terrible. Even positive reviews determined to look past Cane River’s surface-level shortcomings generally acknowledge them in passing, via phrases like “a visibly threadbare production” and “rough clay to say the least.” Let me instead ungallantly say the most: only two actors (the leads, thankfully) rise to the level of passably mediocre; Jenkins’ screenplay consists largely of undigested 18th-century background parroted from a book one character is reading (which another character subsequently buys his own copy of, seeking to investigate further); there must be at least four ostensibly lyrical montages accompanied by entire so-so R&B numbers with lyrics that directly comment upon the action; much of the apparently semi-improvised dialogue finds the cast relying on the sort of stalling-for-time, gotta-say-something repetition (“It’s not too much further to the house” “Oh, it’s not?”) that drives me up the wall in recent Hong joints; one painfully unmodulated mother-daughter shouting match goes on for a small eternity while a third character just sits on the couch looking like he has no idea what to do or even why he’s there; major life decisions get made sans detectable motivation (e.g. the film immediately follows one of its blissful montages with the woman dumping her boyfriend, her stated reason then revealed in the film’s dorky ending as a pointless fake-out ); our hero’s an aspiring poet whose poetry is Vogon-level dire, but the movie does not seem to be aware of this; etc. That’s a lot of poor filmmaking to overcome, and while there’s much of interest in the regional enmity between Catholic Creoles descended from Marie Thérèse Coincoin, a freed slave who married a Frenchman named Metoyer and became a slaveowner herself, and the Baptist descendants of Marie Thérèse’s slaves, who live elsewhere in Natchitoches Parish, I’d probably rather have learned all about it from Gary B. Mills’ The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color, the book repeatedly cited in this very amateurish attempt at drama.