Word: samantha
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Samantha Hughes (Emily Lloyd) of In Country, an adaptation of the novel by Bobbie Ann Mason, is a direct, even artless, projection of this healing spirit. There is nothing metaphoric about the empty space left in her life by the war; her father was killed in Viet Nam before she could know him. Her mother having remarried and moved away, Samantha has chosen to stay behind and share the tumbledown family home in Hopewell, Ky., with her uncle Emmett (Bruce Willis), a veteran damaged by the war in some way he refuses to name. Now in the summer after...
...Samantha's straight-ahead spirit as evoked by Lloyd is irresistibly winning. Eventually it becomes the wedge that pries Emmett out of his shell and forces the girl's grandmother Mamaw (Peggy Rea) to face the feelings that she too has denied since her son's death. These are superb performances as well: Willis has never employed his alert reserve to better effect; Rea perfectly catches both the refrigerator-tidying comedy and the unspoken yearnings of an American Everymom...
...early passages, In Country's script perhaps pursues too many banal and inconsequential matters as it portrays teen life in a small town. Samantha has a boyfriend who does not match her in wit and spirit. She has a girlfriend contending with an unwelcome pregnancy. But the film starts to gather force and direction when a dance, organized to honor the local Viet vets, works out awkwardly. And when -- at Samantha's insistence -- Emmett and Mamaw join her on a pilgrimage to the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the movie achieves real power. Director Norman Jewison understates his final...
...final few scenes of the movie, which bring together Emmett, Samantha and her grandmother at the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington D.C. are undeniably moving. They show by their contrast with the rest of In Country exactly how fine a film was lost in the production of this motion picture...
...cynical and alienated veteran of the Vietnam conflict. He brings a hard-edged intensity to an underwritten character who should have commanded more of In Country's focus. Richard Hamilton and Peggy Rea also lend a much needed sense of realism to the movie with their fine portrayals of Samantha's grandparents...