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The Rain People

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The Rain People

Like "Easy Rider" and "Zabriskie Point," The Rain People is built around the archetypal American journey and that current cinematic fantasy, the freedom of the open road.

Again there are the sweeping travelling shots along miles of motorway, with a varied beautiful countryside glimpsed in romantic angles to the accompaniment of sound track music. It is the pioneer dream of rebirth and renewal; leaving civilization for nature. But unlike "Easy Rider" or "Zabriskie Point", this film is much more.

Pregnant and unsure of herself Natalie (Shirley Knight) leaves her husband's bed to drive endlessly westwards. She stops off at motels and rings him from roadside call boxes. She loves him but cannot explain or understand why she had to get away. Her phone calls become confessions. Worried over her and the child she is carrying her husband tells her, "I'm not impressed with your honesty....I don't want any phone calls about how you feel. I want you to do something."

She already has. Kilgannon (James Caan), a college football star whose head injury has left him a simpleton, has hitched a ride with her and she reluctantly protects him. He grows to love her and almost kills the motorcycle cop (Robert Duval) who picks her up, but is killed himself.

Director Coppola handles the opening sequences with subtle skill and achieves a sense of mellow understatement. In a close up, Natalie reaches her decision in the silence of early morning while lying trapped under the arm of her sleeping husband. William Butler's camera touches the perfect pitch as in the semi-darkness she packs and leaves a note. The scene with her parents is brief and impressive and the flash backs are very well intergrated. Her first phone call near a petrol station must be one of the best telephone conversations of recent cinema.

The viewpoint has been subjective and sympathetic up to this point but when she is on the road and even more so when other characters appear she is suddenly seen objectively and suffers as a result. The change is a mistake, but Shirley Knight gives a good performance. So do James Caan and Robert Duval in their smaller roles.

Coppola also wrote the script and shows he is not afraid of silence. It is both a strength and a weakness. He uses it to establish complex moods as in the bedroom or in the bleak motels, but at moments in the travelling episodes it places too great an emphasis on the landscape and the atmosphere is allowed to thin. However the irony that she is travelling nowhere is made.

Even though Kilgannon's death is not entirely out of context, violent endings are often too easy and are now becoming something of a cliche in the American cinema.

Rob Cameron