CANDY MOUNTAIN
With Kevin J. O’Connor, Harris Yulin, Tom Waits, Bulle Ogier, Roberts Blossom, Leon Redbone, and Dr. John.
The collaboration between Frank and Wurlitzer as directors was reportedly a difficult one, and certain scenes in the film do have a tentative and/or rough-hewn quality, but the overall flow of the film is relaxed and amiable, the overall tone wry and humorous. As suggested above, the film seems controlled more by the viewpoint of Wurlitzer than by that of Frank.
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It wasn’t until I transcribed the above passage that I realized just how dated it might seem today, and how such preoccupations may register as so much mumbo jumbo to a good many contemporary readers. But what Poirier is referring to, which has significant links with both collectivized forms of thinking and hallucinogenic drug experiences, is still a pertinent part of our culture, which eight years of Reagan have obscured more than erased, and Wurlitzer remains one of our sharpest guides to the nuances of this kind of thought. The “historic consequence” of this sensibility is that, in contrast to much of current ideology, it is itself historically grounded, and one of the major achievements of Candy Mountain is its sense of history–not merely its historical grasp of the past two decades, but its sense of a larger history of North America that stretches all the way from the earliest white settlers to the present moment.
The first things he loses on his journey are his girlfriend and his car; fed up with having supported him and his foolishness, she abandons him on the highway. He’s offered a lift by a sympathetic van driver who advises him, “Life ain’t no candy mountain. . . . In this country, a man without wheels is only half a man.” He takes Book straight to the door of his initial destination, the home of Silk’s nouveau riche brother Al (Tom Waits), but then demands $50 for the ride–an early indication that no one in Book’s travels will ever offer him anything for nothing.
One reason for recounting this much of the movie’s rambling plot (which is far from everything that happens to Book on the road) is to give some notion of its oddball humor, principles of economy, and overall shaggy-dog rhythm. As in “Heart of Darkness,” the eventual appearance of the unseen legend is at once an elucidation and an anticlimax (and Harris Yulin as Silk works both sides of this paradox rather effectively). Book learns that Silk couldn’t care less about his proposal–“Sonny, you’re not even on the board, not even at the tail end of my dance card”–and what we learn about Silk in the present, while full of further paradox, only illustrates and amplifies the abdication of patriarchal power that has informed our understanding of him from the beginning.
