The Rain People movie review & film summary (1969)
In "The Rain People" Coppola takes his characters across a carefully observed American landscape. Miss Knight and Caan drive through small country towns, and big cities.
But the Shirley Knight character filters the landscape through her own disillusionment and despair. (She's trapped in a marriage she doesn't believe in, and she's going to have a child she's not sure she wants.) The "Easy Rider" characters on the other hand, would like to see groovy things but in their landscape everything seems to be going wrong. The kids in the hippie communes are as screwed up as the rednecks in the roadside cafe.
Huck Finn had this figured out and he tried to fence off the world by creating his own and taking it with him. There was nothing so nice and smooth and quiet and easy as laying on your back on that raft in the middle of the night, floating down the Mississippi and watching the stars slide past.
As for Coppola and his world, it's difficult to say whether his film is successful or not. That's the beautiful thing about a lot of the new, experimental American directors, they'd rather do interesting things and make provocative observations than try to outflank John Ford on his way to the Great American Movie.
So all you can really say, I guess, is here's what Coppola's up to. It is a traditional American pastime and a noble one -- exploring the country through the eyes of a dissatisfied searcher. And what the search discovers is no more (and no less) than a crossroads in Oklahoma, a parade in Pennsylvania, long nights on the road, a hero who got banged on the head, and a highway patrolman who is, even so, a human being. And these places and people fit together, they love or hate each other, all because of the accident of being alive at the same time and place.
It takes the innocent (the slave Jim, the simpleton pothead, the football hero) to ask -- why aren't you happy? What are you looking for? And it takes the sophisticate (as Huck Finn understood so well in his long chats with Jim) to say: If you can ask the question you don't need the answer.
