Northfork Review

Northfork is a film so obsessed with a sepia-tinged vision of a vintage, mythic America that even the red, white and blue of the stars and stripes appear as yellow and brown on the screen. The film is set on the plains of Montana, where buffalo (and stranger beasts) still roam, the horizon marked by snowy mountains with rolling grasslands beneath. It's a dramatic, striking environment as imagined and captured by the Polish brothers, Michael and Mark, who co-scripted and co-produced the film.

While Michael directs, Mark appears in the film's well-stocked ensemble cast. Mark plays Willis, son to James Woods' Walter O'Brien. It's 1955, and the O'Briens are two of six black-clad, Ford-driving men whose job it is to coerce the final few stubborn residents of Northfork out of their homes. Why? Because the whole area is to be flooded within days, to create the reservoir for a hydroelectric power station.

Among the remaining residents are the community's spiritual leader Father Harlan (Nolte) and his young orphan charge Irwin (Farnes). Irwin is very ill, and will not survive relocation. While in bed, he fantasises about being a member of a race of angels; these visions blur with the (slightly) more realistic action involving the work of the evacuation agents. Even among the agents there are reservations about leaving the town - Walter, for example, has left to exhume his dead wife from the local cemetery ("This is wrong in every way," says Willis). It's not a happy matter ushering in the death of a whole town.