When Joseph was young, he sustained a disability in a farming accident which left him with a hurt leg, stopping him from living far from home. He resides in the farmhouse he grew up in and has been a teacher at the local school for many years. He is honest with himself I’m a mediocre teacher and an even worse farmer. He has been in a relationship with the widow of his best friend for six years now and he jokes that he might end up marrying her if he ever runs out of excuses.
In the barn, she attempts to seduce her 47-year-old teacher. He rejects her and walks away, only to later return and say, I think we should make love. This story is recounted in Farmer, the 1976 novel by Jim Harrison about a man of risks, most often the most dangerous the wrong ones. In the film, Eve is played by Dennis Hopper who, for most audiences, might be surprising after their most recent films. The role of young Catherine was captured by Amy Locane while Rosealee, the sweet woman who has been so kindly and patiently courted all these years, is performed by Amy Irving. However, Bruno Barreto’s “Carried Away” is more than a simple love triangle, and while it creates the expected tension, it is remarkable in how it leaves those tensions unresolved.
Even the most junior character in the movie possesses more speech skills and knowledge than any American movie allows and with having tangled in emotions, they set forth to untangle themselves.
Dennis Hopper has acted in films for over 41 years. For the past ten, he has enjoyed making money playing lunatic roles, like the mad bomb thrower in Speed and the lizard king in Super Mario Bros. Yet he wants to do something great and gets it from time to time so when the part he wants to play appears, he stops caring about paychecks. He did that in “The Indian Runner” and “Paris Trout” and here he is, yet again, astoundingly broadening our horizons.
He is a good man. He does his best to teach. He walks slowly through life, not purely due to his limp, but by choice. When Catherine shows him her breasts, it is difficult to encapsulate everything in his mind. Perhaps he assumes that she is more aware of what she is attempting to do than he does, and that should he refrain from diving headfirst into sexual madness, he will march towards his grave unable to escape. Sure, that is incorrect, but all the good he has done has also been wrong.
What does the girl wish for? Her mother is a homebound alcoholic and her father (Gary Busey), a retired major, spends his time in the district hunting. Catherine aspires to attend drama school. She knows that Joseph is the only local man who seems interested in the arts. It is also suggested that she has previously used sex as a means of expediently entering adulthood. (Whatever happened, her father later recalls, I have a feeling it was more than half her idea.) Along with this private drama, Joseph has another problem. A smaller local school is about to consolidate with a larger school, and he will be out of a job as a teacher. Is there any chance he could go back to farming? He is not sure. Rosealee wants him to marry her but she is currently playing nurse to her dying mother. And Joseph senses that their love has become a routine. After Catherine gives him a sufficient reminder of what passion feels like he barges into Rosalee’s part of their shared dorm one night and orders her to “turn on the lights” and let’s have “wild sex” instead of their usual scripted and practiced sex.
“Carried Away” is not a neat package. You don’t leave it knowing exactly what it was saying, or how it felt about all of the characters Catherine, unfinished in life, is wisely not defined too carefully. What you do feel is that these people also including the local doctor, played by Hal Holbrook were not born yesterday, and have the imagination to figure out what to do next–instead of simply using the standard melodramatic tools of guns and emotional explosions. They get into a painful situation, and then they go to work getting out, and seeing if they learned anything.
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