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The Manly Ideal	Films: Down Off the Farm
Music: Jazz with Ivy League Manners	Chapter & Verse
Off the Shelf	Open Book: Friends of France

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The problem with home movies is that viewer interest tends to fall off sharply when the audience is unacquainted with the cast. But we have a very different animal when the "home movie" is made by highly accomplished professional filmmakers, and narrates a critical moment in a family history that typifies the plight of thousands of Americans. Then we have a poignant documentary film-in this case, one that swept both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for an Academy Award. Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern, produced, written, and directed by Jeanne Jordan, a Bunting Institute fellow in 1992-93, and her husband, Steven Ascher '82, takes viewers into Jordan's Iowa family in 1990 as economic forces squeeze her parents off the farm that had been in the family since 1867. You might call it a home movie about people who are losing theirs.

Jordan narrates the film, which opens in theaters in November. "People love to idealize farm life," she says at the outset. "They think it's wholesome and simple." Instead, Troublesome Creek suggests that keeping a family farm alive in the 90s is a business challenge worthy of any M.B.A. Jordan's parents have $70,000 in debt and need a $150,000 operating loan to keep farming. But changes in bank ownership have put new and wary loan officers, who balk at extending the credit, in charge of their account. "Why, after all these years, had they lost faith in my parents?" Jordan asks.

Troublesome Creek, named for the stream behind the farm that "twists and turns with no warning," watches the Jordan family respond to this twist of fate, and makes the viewer care about them and the destiny of their farm. This is no small achievement, since to all appearances Russel and Mary Jane Jordan, Jeanne Jordan's parents, are two of the dullest people ever filmed at 24 frames per second. Yet somehow, Russel's stolid, expressionless mien becomes an anchor for the story, and your heart will ache when you see him go out to feed his cows for the last time. Soon thereafter, Mary Jane weeps as their herd is auctioned off; many viewers will cry with her.

In the 1960s there were 6 million farmers in the United States; there are fewer than 2 million today. Troublesome Creek won't explain those statistics, but it certainly personalizes them. Here, the buck stops here with the banker, a villain squarely in the moustache-twirling tradition of movies from earlier in the century; there's no broader view of the economic trends that shape banking decisions. But Troublesome Creek is not about the economy; it is a movie about home. It is about family bonds and neighborly ties, and how meaningful a field of corn or an Ethan Allen table can become to someone who has cared for it. "Growing up on a farm is like growing up on an island," Jeanne Jordan says. "Your family becomes your world." In Troublesome Creek, it becomes our world, too.


~ Craig Lambert

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