Off The Map (DVD)

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Director Campbell Scott—son of actors George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst—saw an original play in the Berkshires that stuck with him. It was about an isolated family in New Mexico who lived off the land and treated the intrusion of an IRS agent with the same matter-of-factness as any old inquisitive critter. Years later, Scott asked the playwright, Joan Ackerman, to adapt her play for the big screen, and on the commentary track she gushes how happy she is with the final product. Part of the reason is that while New Mexico was a presence in the play, Ackerman rightly calls the location just north of Taos the film's "leading character."

The photography is absolutely stunning, with shots of solitary figures off-center to showcase the expansiveness of the New Mexico Territory. It captures the soul of the land which feeds people like Arlene (Joan Allen), who likes to garden in the nude and can fix a car as good as anyone—even as her 11-year-old daughter, Bo (Valentina de Angelis), can think of nothing but escaping. "When my Mastercard charge card comes, I'm outa here," she declares, this female and slightly felonious George Bailey. To fill out the application, she needs to show a checking account and social security number, but that's no problem. She simply asks George (J.K. Simmons), Dad's somewhat slow best friend, to share his numbers with her, just out of curiosity. Newcomer de Angelis is wholly believable as the precocious little girl who peruses cruise ship line pamphlets, ties her own fishing flies, shoots squirrels with a homemade bow and arrow, and writes fraudulent complaints to companies, hoping to be sent free products.

You'd think Dad would object to some of her antics, but Charley (Sam Elliott) has problems of his own. He's clinically depressed, and shuffles from frame to frame in a kind of haze. Elliott seems tailor-made for the role, ratcheting down his normally laconic and sad-eyed performance to just the right level where you can believe Charley as a flesh-and-blood character. But it's Allen as Arlene who makes the film work. Like early pioneers, this earth-mother has honed her coping skills to a point even sharper than her daughter's stick-arrows, and she tends to her family with the same gentle care as her flowers.

Dialogue is downplayed in order to imbue these characters with a quiet strength, and to allow us to focus on the land as a living and breathing part of their lives. When an IRS agent comes to them, it's not because their income is suspect. The family gets by on Charley's $320 per month veteran's compensation and income from the sale of flowers. The problem is that they haven't bothered to file for the last seven years. But it doesn't take new IRS agent William Gibbs (Jim True-Frost) long to come around to the family's way of thinking. After he falls ill with fever and is tended to by Arlene for a full month, he becomes as much a part of their group as George, while his presence brings about changes in each character's personality . . . including,, of course, his own. The former short-order cook decides, in short order, that this eccentric family has found something special in the middle of beautiful nowhere. In fact, as the narrator, Bo, tells us, civilization and "excitement" for these folks is the Taos Junction Café, and the discovery of a tortilla with the face of Christ on it.