Far North

Not only does Sam Shepard get to be an award-winning playwright (Fool for Love), a sought-after leading man (The Right Stuff), and the live-in companion of Jessica Lange. Now he gets to direct a movie, too.

The film is Far North, and Shepard also wrote the script. For a writer of such clear ambitions, Far North is a surprisingly tame film, as though Shepard, learning a new craft, wanted to start off slowly. This he does, and the movie remains modest, though it’s often a beguiling thing to watch.

Actually, it begins at a brisk clip, as a prickly old geezer (Charles Durning) is sent head first onto the cold Minnesota ground by a skittish horse. This puts him in the hospital, alongside his brother (Donald Moffat), a drunk who’s drying out.

The accident, not a serious one, brings his daughter (Jessica Lange) in from the big city. From his hospital bed, he gives her an assignment: Shoot the horse. Shoot the horse? This bewildering order, which she is determined to fulfill, puts her at loggerheads with her sister (Tess Harper), who still lives out on the family farm with their spacey mother (Ann Wedgeworth).

Strangely enough, this minor family crisis turns out to be the mainspring of the plot, which unfolds to include the wayward antics of Harper’s own daughter (Patricia Arquette). Eventually, the entire clan ends up combing the woods for the horse, who has understandably quit the scene.

The whole movie is played as a rural comedy, and a lot of it is gently amusing. When Lange asks her father why he couldn’t just wait until he gets out of the hospital to shoot the animal himself, he replies, with perfect logic, that the horse won’t know why he’s getting shot if they wait.

Shepard is perfectly willing to drag in some familiar drunken philosophizing between the two brothers, and he’s not above using old gags, such as the moment when Lange finds daddy’s shotgun in a cupboard and assures her sister that it isn’t loaded—bang. At these moments, you wonder: This is America’s boldest playwright?

But if you go into Far North with lowered sights, it’s enjoyable. The locations are nice, the music by the Red Clay Ramblers is bouncy, and all of the people in it are nice to be around. Lange does particularly good work, from her initial nervousness with her pa to her high-heel clunkiness when she’s trying to fit in at the farm. She and Shepard are obviously a simpatico couple.

First published in The Herald, November 1988

Shepard directed one more feature, Silent Tongue. This was in the first year of Patricia Arquette’s career, and give Shepard credit for casting: That’s a heckuva line-up.