Sunshine State (15)

Southern Discomfort

Internal links

Jonathan Romney on 'Sunshine State'

Anthony Quinn on 'Sunshine State'

John Sayles: 'I'm not that famous, so I can say anything I want...'

Edie Falco: The reluctant star

Down in Delrona Beach, Florida, the setting of John Sayles's thoughtful new movie Sunshine State, folks have got "history to burn". And that's exactly what young arsonist Terrell (Alexander Lewis) is going to do with it, torching the replica pirate ship on the beachfront and thus removing the centrepiece of the town's Buccaneer Days parade. These days, the buccaneers are real-estate developers who want to clear a couple of run-down beach towns and replace them with exclusive resorts for holidaying Northerners, just like they created golf courses "out of the muck and the mangrove". As in his last picture, Limbo, a community is in transition, and Sayles investigates a loose ensemble of individuals who have arrived at personal and social crossroads. Hard questions are asked: to cling to what you've got (which might not be enough anyway) or sell up and move on while you can still get a decent price?

The dilemma is eloquently focused in the case of two different women, one white, one black. Marly Temple (Edie Falco) runs a motel-restaurant and hates what has become of her life – a useless ex-husband who specialises in crackpot schemes (anyone for a "mail-order iguana business"?) and now a young golfer with a bad case of "the yips". As she explains to the handsome landscape architect (Timothy Hutton) who is working with the real-estate people, she used to be a mermaid at a local aquarium show and developed a talent for holding her breath underwater. On the evidence of her wry bar-stool wit and her look of martyred stoicism, she's been drowning ever since.

Just along the beach, Desiree Perry (Angela Bassett) is returning to the place she left as a 15-year-old, hoping to make peace with the mother (Mary Alice) who sent her away to spare the family the scandal of her teen pregnancy. Desiree has since walked the boulevard of broken dreams, having pursued a career in showbiz only to end up doing infomercials on daytime TV. Good job she chose a decent man (James McDaniel) to marry and not the football star Flash Phillips (Tom Wright), who also happens to be back in town, fronting a real-estate venture to persuade the black residents of Lincoln Beach to sell up.

Around these two cluster a shifting series of vignettes. Sayles is delving into the same mulch of political compromise and breakdown as City of Hope (1991), but something has loosened up in his style; he's not wielding the lash so much this time, and the quartet of fat-cat golfers who bookend the picture come across not as sleazeball opportunists but a Runyonesque chorus of wags. "Florida," says their leader (Alan King), "the old name means, in Seminole, 'you shouldn't go there'."

There's corruption, of course, in this torpid, soupy atmosphere, but it's not the kind of evil-doing that Carl Hiaasen's novels flagellate so savagely. One feels more pity than contempt for the ruined local councillor (Gordon Clapp) who tries to hang himself from a tree in the glades, only to feel the branch bow soggily to earth; the wood is as rotten as he is. Death goes dogging everywhere, past and present, even in the amdram group run by Marly's suave old mother (Jane Alexander), who needs a coffin built for their latest production, As I Lay Dying. Desiree's husband, an anesthesiologist, knows that his patients worry that they'll die under his drugs, and the pirate ship's Jolly Roger finds an answering echo in the old Indian skull found beneath the jaws of the developers' digger.

One of Sayles's abiding strengths is his ability to get something extra out of actors. Previously, most of the stand-out performances in his work have been by men – Chris Cooper in Lone Star, David Strathairn in Limbo – but here, Edie Falco raises the bar with a marvellous character study. I thought I'd seen the best of this actress as Carmela in The Sopranos, the Mafia wife who loves and hates the life she has chosen. As Marly, she carries the same air of proud disappointment, only she's more resigned and amusing about her fate, taking the edge off her ennui with another shot of tequila. Her flirtation with Timothy Hutton has a humorous languor, and a sadness, for we see how, in another life, these two might be made for each other.

As Desiree, Angela Bassett is more tightly wound, and you can almost hear her count to 10 before replying to her mother's latest barb. Her amazing tiger-eyes are like warning lamps: once they begin to flash, you'd better get out of her way, a lesson one feels that her doctor husband will not be slow to absorb. Whenever these two are on screen, Sunshine State feels in good hands, and Sayles's script maintains a rueful and undogmatic dialogue between the desire to preserve and the inevitability of change (often called "progress"). "Nature is overrated," says the golfing tycoon. "But we'll miss it when it's gone," comes the reply.

Yet there is something about this enormously decent and well-made film that leaves you unsatisfied, even impatient. It has the occasional feeling of a ship on a becalmed ocean, unable to go one way or the other until a wind gets up. Individual scenes, however wittily and intricately written, don't propel the narrative forwards; its movement remains lateral. Whereas in an Altman film, one feels a whole canvas unfurling when characters make connections with one another, this film never feels more than the sum of its parts. It could be the enervating Florida climate, but relationships here stall just as they're about to get interesting – for instance, how can the festival organiser Francine (Mary Steenburgen) say with such love, "You are my rock", to a husband who has spent the movie taking backhanders to clear his debts and trying to kill himself? On such ironies and anomalies a great film might be made, but that film isn't Sunshine State.