Stacking Reviews

Set under Montana's big sky in 1954, STACKING is story of a young girl's coming of age, her mother's coming to terms with herself, and an alcohol-drenched farmhand's redemption. About to lose his farm, Dan Morgan (Ray Baker) ends up in the hospital following an accident, while his wife Kathleen (Christine Lahti) longs for the world outside the tiny Montana town. Their 14-year-old daughter, Anna Mae (Megan Follows), tries to cope with the problems around her by enlisting the help of Buster McGuire (Frederic Forrest), her father's former farmhand, in converting an old truck into a stacker--a forkliftlike vehicle used to stack bales of hay. Without the fine performances of Follows and Forrest, this Martin Rosen-directed film might have been little more than a slow-moving meditation on the embattled family farmer. However, the wonderful chemistry between Follows and Forrest invests the story with a poignancy that the screenplay only barely provides. The deliberate pace Rosen gives his film is appropriate for its slice-of-life insights, though occasionally the narrative becomes bogged down.