Red Dirt Reviews

Though it owes its title to Eudora Welty quotation, this exercise in southern discomfort simmers the William trio — Inge, Faulkner, and Tennessee — in a Gothic gumbo that's something less than rib sticking. Griffith Joseph Burns (Dan Montgomery) was raised by his eccentric Aunt Summer (Karen Black) after his parents were killed in a car crash that actually may have been a murder-suicide, and feels the tug of faraway places, even though he's entangled in an ongoing affair with his first cousin, Emily Whaley (Aleksa Palladino). Never the sharpest tack in the box, fluttery Aunt Summer grows harder to handle with age and Griffith tires of the routine of tending to chores and soothing Auntie's bundle of nerves. While formulating his departure plans, Griffith rents out a cabin on the family's rundown estate. The first applicant, Lee Todd (Walton Goggins), is a strapping itinerant laborer who takes a liking to Griffith. When the two men become thick as thieves, Emily resents their attachment. She can't understand how Griffith could turn his back on her and abandon ditzy Aunt Summer, and believes Griffith can only flower in the red soil of his birthplace. Seduced by wanderlust, Griffith considers hitting the road with Lee, but once Lee reveals his homosexual attraction to Griffith, the trip's off. Furthermore, Aunt Summer reveals a secret about his parentage and the heartache that preceded his parents' deaths. The fed-up Emily hightails it to New Orleans and Lee departs for gayer pastures, but Griffith can't figure out where he belongs and must decide whether to heed the call of love or duty. If writer-director Tag Purvis had focused on the relationship between the sensitive drifter and the ambivalent farm boy, this might have been an evocative piece about emerging bisexuality as a companion to coming-of-age. Instead, it burrows into incest, suicide, illegitimacy, and other assorted breast-beating topics that dilute the impact of the love triangle.