Sea of Grass

My cousin and I share an affection for the small farm town where she grew up, where our mothers grew up, where years ago I would come from the city and visit on various holiday-themed pretexts. She lives near Phoenix now but was up in the old place this past weekend, staying with a childhood friend. I went down to visit and we all smoked a bowl and wound up thoroughly confused by one of the worst and weirdest movies ever made.

Hepburn and Tracy are famous for their on-screen connection but it was largely missing this time around. I couldn't even figure out if they liked each other. I also couldn't figure out if Tracy's Brewton was a bad guy or a good guy or what. He seemed nice enough, but was a bit harsh on any locals who didn't already own a shitload of cattle. Hepburn's rail-thin character had the usual ridiculous mid-Atlantic accent and of course infused almost every word with power. But she had so much grace and poise I felt I was watching an infomercial for charm school. The only really real person in the whole movie was Uncle Joe, taking a break from Petticoat Junction to come rock cradles and boil water. He was the cook, evidently. But all I ever saw him cook was water. Maybe that explains Kate's figure.

Anyway, there's a lot of sitting around indoors during brutal winter storms, no one talking much or even going online, and some tension I never quite grasped with another character, someone rather more attractive than Spencer Tracy but apparently not on his Christmas card list. Confused by her feelings for these two very different men, Hepburn kisses her daughter goodbye and goes off to St. Louis, of all places. Why? Fuck if I know. If her trouble was that she liked the local lawyer dude more than her rich husband, all she needed was a night out with the girls, they'd straighten her out. Or talk her into some trouble, and she got that anyway, but needn't have gone all the way to St. Louis for it. At any rate, she and the lawyer hook up, or so I'm told, but I missed it. They went out for a sleigh ride, which was apparently a pretty hot date in those days. Next thing I knew she was back home and had borne the lawyer's child. All of that action, even being pregnant, was off-screen, of course, and my cousin had to explain to me what happened. In hindsight I thought she should have exorcised his rising lust with a friendly blow job but the silly git went and got herself pregnant.

So now there are two children getting ignored in the nursery instead of just one, and Uncle Joe boiling more water and keeping more secrets, and I looked in vain for a beer (I dislike visiting houses of people I barely know, especially when they don't offer me a drink and I don't know at what point I should just start rustling around in the garage for myself), and texted one of my closest friends in desperation for escape from the hell that had captured me but in vain, and all of a sudden the love-child Brock was all grown up and acting like a 1947 movie teenager, talking back to his dad very modern-like.

Except it's not his dad, and he knows it, and so does everyone else, and no one talks about it or says a thing, so he's a very angry young man carrying some horrible shameful secret. See, this is where the movie lost me. Actually it lost me while I was looking for a drink. Kate Hepburn moves away, see. Leaves her children because of the shame in bearing a child for a man not her husband, even though no one supposedly knows about it, except they do, they just pretend they don't. Even Uncle Joe. And I'm all, what the fuck? Okay, so she had an affair. Decide on a divorce or not, work out who gets to be the kid's dad, and move on. But no! All the main characters spend twenty years in some sort of weird limbo: Hepburn missing her children, her children hating the mother that abandoned them (can't blame them for that), Spencer Tracy looking very noble considering the unbelievable scale of his emotional immaturity, and, who was it, ah yes, the very handsome Melvyn Douglas as the local judge who takes the proper side in the tension between Brewton's cattlemen and the incoming farmers, but who spends two decades watching his son grow up into a juvenile delinquent who hates him, even though no one's supposed to know they're related, I don't know, it made absolutely no sense.

Anyway, the thing ends when a shootout leads to another shootout and next thing you know, the two movie stars, who haven't aged a day in twenty years and who've just lost a son to a fusillade from the sheriff's posse, walk away arm in arm into the sunset. And I sat in my overstuffed chair staring dumbly at the screen. I still don't know what the hell happened, because it didn't look like science fiction to me, but I still have a hard time believing these people were human. Was it some weird 19th Century sensibility drawn through some weird late 1940s lens? Could be, could be. Both eras were chock full of inhumane weirdness, stuff that makes our modern backwoods Muslims and their bizarre sex- and woman-hating beliefs downright understandable. Well, almost.

I blame that smoldering sea of grass.