When I heard what other folks said about it –often bad – I just shook my head and stayed mute.” He’s right – it’s not simply a union story and neither is the movie. After I devoured the final pages, a kind of silence descended because my friend was dead wrong – it wasn’t a union novel. In between there was a lot of music, some cheap wine, then black coffee. When the sun came up the next morning, I was still in the chair and stayed there until sometime later that day when I finished the book. In his excellent introduction to a newer edition of the novel, Charles Bowden wrote of Kesey’s opening: “That opening hit my head in the growing darkness around six p.m. nothing to indicate movement except the swirling clots of yellow foam skimming seaward with the wind, and the thrusting groves of flooded bam, bent taut and trembling by the pull of silent, dark momentum.” Flat as a rain-textured street even during flood season because of a channel so deep and a bed so smooth: no shallows to set up buckwater rapids, no rocks to rile the surface. Closer still, it flattens into a river, flat as a street, cement-gray with a texture of rain. Closer, becoming organic, a vast smile of water with broken and rotting pilings jagged along both gums, foam clinging to the lips. “Metallic at first, seen from the highway down through the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy moon. Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce-and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir-the actual river falls five hundred feet. Then, through bear-berry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. “The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting. come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River. “Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range.
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION MOVIE IMAGES HOW TO
It’s so cinematic and so poetic that it would make a cameraman jealous – how to compete with this? The opening of the novel makes the reader tremble – it’s so vivid that it almost ( almost) veers into the purple, but it never falls over that edge. Newman really digs into the logging sequences, the very specific and tough labor of logging, and they’re spectacular, visceral – these long sequences of working speak more powerfully than dialogue ever could.Īdapting this story from Ken Kesey’s monumental, experimental and brilliant novel (not discussed enough these days, much like Newman’s movie), screenwriter John Gay must have felt the pressure of Kesey’s prose – one wonders if he felt it could crush him, like attempting to adapt Faulkner. Wrapping the PNW around this family (the Stampers, led by Henry Fonda’s cantankerous Henry and Newman’s Hank, a goddamn-you-all independent logging clan with their own company, devoid of unions and who work during a strike…), Newman takes his time with scenes showing early morning boat rides, ocean touch football turned to fistfights, rain-soaked discussions on sturdy porches built for the dampness and logging. The film was shot in Lincoln County, Oregon and around the Oregon Coast – Kernville, Newport, Yaquina Bay, the Yaquina River – and Newman (with cinematographer Richard Moore) makes this green-gorgeous, stunningly imposing, feral landscape central, deeply embedded in the character’s bones. But the beauty’s not so simple – there’s the dampness, the rugged terrain, all that rain, the danger, the expanse and the isolation – this is an environment that has merged with the bodies of these characters and what they do – they are so intimately connected to the trees, that they climb them and cling to them and they cut them down.
The opening begins in a setting so lyrical, lovely, scary and important to the story, to who these people are, and what affects their lives, that it’s fundamental, it’s their lifeblood. It could be a typical establishing moment – here we are in the fictional Wakonda, Oregon where our characters, loggers, reside. Paul Newman’s Sometimes a Great Notion opens with pine trees and the roaring ocean and with Charley Pride singing over the wet, green Pacific Northwest prettiness and it’s so gorgeous that you can practically touch and smell a time and a place, almost now past.
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