Hold the Phone

By R.C.

RAGGEDY MAN Directed by Jack Fisk Screenplay by William D. Wittliff

What to make of this slice of American pie, this pastoral adagio, this memoir-nightmare? Writer Wittliff has drawn the film's setting and tone from his childhood in a small Texas town off the gulf. Nita Longley (Sissy Spacek), a divorced woman with two sons, works in an isolated house as the town's switchboard operator. She meets a fresh-faced sailor (handsomely played by Eric Roberts); there is a tender affair, another man (Sam Shepard), a pair of resentful layabouts, an abrupt slash of melodrama. Except for the denouement, Raggedy Man proceeds with the even pace of a journey over the Texas plains as seen through a child's wide eyes.

The film might have been made in the 1940s, when "regional" writers were charting new corners of the American subconscious and film makers like Frank Borzage and Clarence Brown were spring-cleaning old work clothes and folkways. If there is an intrusive touch of modernism, it comes from Shepard, the playwright whose Buried Child and The West tunnel into the dreams of the rural working class, and then explode them. As the haunted "raggedy man," Shepard lurks at the edges of the film's life, giving it texture and menace and meaning. But Spacek is the center. Until now a worldly child-woman, with the most infectious smile in movies, Spacek here proves she need not play gamines for the rest of her career. Jack Fisk, the most talented of the young American production designers (Days of Heaven, Movie Movie) and Spacek's husband, makes an assured directorial debut, trusting the material enough to present it without apology or irony. Now it's up to moviegoers to trust themselves and find Raggedy Man. --R.C.

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