Campbell Scott’s Off the Map, adapted for the screen
from her own play by Joan Ackerman, is a highly atmospheric drama
set in New Mexico in the 1970s that looks as if it is going to be
pathography — the story of a man who suffers from depression and
the effect his illness has on his family — and ends up being
something quite different. Charley Groden (Sam Elliott) —no
relation to the actor and talk-show host with a similar name — is
the depressive. He lives in a desert shack that really is off the
map with his wife, Arlene (Joan Allen), and their daughter, a
precocious, imaginative child of maybe 12 or 13 called Bo
(Valentina de Angelis), both of whom are beginning to lose patience
with Charley, though for different reasons. Arlene has the job of
keeping the family together on virtually no income without any help
from Charley. What little money they have comes from her job
teaching men in prison to read. Bo, who sees her father’s
depression as being “like a geological formation by which our lives
were defined,” is being home-schooled by her mother but has a
natural teenage urge to escape. She finally decrees that she has
decided to go to high school.
There are hints that Charley’s depression may have something to
do with service in Vietnam, but they are not followed up. Otherwise
it is presented as a given, a visitation from God upon a man who is
by nature and has been until recently happy and sanguine in
temperament. The story, told by the grown-up Bo (Amy Brenneman) in
flashback, is meant to be seen in relation to her grown-up self,
but we see too little of that for it to be anything more than a
framing device. It begins with the arrival at their desert home of
an IRS auditor called William Gibbs (Jim True-Frost). Having had to
abandon his car in the desert and walk the rest of the way to the
house, to which there is no paved road, Gibbs arrives at the
Grodens’ house to find Arlene gardening in the nude.
Simultaneously, he is stung by hornets, to which he has an allergic
reaction. Perhaps this is exacerbated by the deep impression made
upon him by the sight of naked Arlene, but he becomes very ill and
is forced to lodge with the Grodens for several days during which
he suffers from periods of delirium.
During a lucid interval, Charley comes to talk to him. “Have you
ever been depressed?” he asks.
“I have never not been depressed,” Gibbs confides. And
then he tells Charley of how he came home from school one day when
he was six to discover the body of his mother, who had hanged
herself.
“You put me to shame,” says Charley, citing “a good reason like
that” when there is no known reason for his own depression.
But when Gibbs recovers, he announces that he has experienced
two revelations. One is that he is in love with Arlene. The other
is that he thinks his memory of discovering his mother’s body may
be unreliable, planted there by an older brother. Both seem to him
to be potential exits from depression. It might have been an idea
to show the two depressives battling for the hand of the fair
Arlene, but this is Bo’s story and is headed in another direction,
hinted at when Gibbs tells Arlene not only that he loves her but
that the burden of his childhood memory may have lifted and that
“the only thing I know to be true is my love for you.”
She replies that “New Mexico is very powerful.”
And so it seems. The tourist slogan, “Land of Enchantment,” is
here taken literally, and the family’s desert idyll takes on a
charming unreality. In fact, it is a kind of Garden of Eden — as
is suggested by the iconic image of naked Arlene amidst her desert
flora — into which sexual knowledge has not yet entered, either
for Bo as she remembers it or for anyone else. William Gibbs stays
on with the family, abandons the IRS and all the rest of his past,
and becomes a celebrated painter in whose works critics find
“disturbing depths of emotion.” But, so far as Bo (and therefore
we) can see, the love not only of Gibbs but even of her father for
her mother is entirely platonic. Hints of the homoerotic between
dad and his best friend, George (J.K. Simmons), are likewise raised
only to be abandoned.
Is this Bo looking back on Eden and averting her eyes from what
she does not want to see? Is she, like William Gibbs, building her
life on the foundation of a manufactured memory? Or is it Eden
indeed, a version of the hippie dream of a self-sufficient desert
commune but magically purged of the sexual tensions that were the
undoing of so many real communes? I think that both Joan Ackerman
and Campbell Scott like this ambiguity. In fact, it is their point.
This is a fantasy — although it looks like a somewhat dated one by
the standards of the first decade of the 21st century — and they
mean to make us believe in it one way or the other. Of course, they
are helped by tremendous performances in all the leading roles and
by breathtaking photography of the New Mexican desert, but you may
have the same experience I did of coming away from this Land of
Enchantment, shaking your head and finding that it all just
disappears, like a dream.
