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The Trip to Bountiful, Directed by Peter Masterson
Island Pictures, December 25, 1985 (US)
Screenplay: Horton Foote
Starring: Geraldine Page, John Heard, Carlin Glynn, and Rebecca De Mornay
Mrs. Carrie Watts (Geraldine Page): It’s come to me what to do. I’ll go on. That much has come to me. I’ll go on. I feel my strength and my purpose strong within me. I’ll go on. I will go to Bountiful. I will walk the twelve miles if I have to.
But you can’t. You can’t go back. Oft-quoted, oft-repeated: You can’t go home again. It is a universal theme that strikes a chord so deep within the majority that the Thomas Wolfe title has long since graduated into a colloquialism.
Carrie: But I’m going, you understand that? You’ll see. This is a free country and I’m going to tell him that, and no sheriff or king or president is going to keep me from going to Bountiful!
But you can’t. You can’t go back. You can’t go home again. No hope of reviving the past no matter how persistent or frequent the attempts.
Ludie Watts (John Heard): Mama, I wanna stop remembering. It doesn’t do any good remembering.
So why the refusal to let it go? Why is the past a dream unwilling to fade even now, long after it wakes up from its present-day slumber? Attempts to dig deeper to pin it down, hoping to find a reason that makes better sense, lead here, to that same old intersection—past & present—wondering whether it is the equation that has been oversimplified. Why is it, exactly, that you can’t go home again? It is easy to understand that you can’t relive the past and also how difficult it becomes to recover the pieces from memory that drift without end, further and further out from shore. But is there more? Perhaps, a new conclusion. An edited one.
Perhaps we can’t go home again because in fact we’ve never really left at all.
Despite all the travels, far and wide, so many miles from the starting gate, the song remains suspiciously the same. In the end, there is simply no way to distance the emotional connection—good, bad, indifferent—conjured up from that place called home. Home sweet home. The physical’s got nothing over the emotional. A pull of heartstrings. Bewilderment. As only desperate yearning over something so frustratingly close but forever out of reach can facilitate. Attempts to replay the past in cobwebbed minds cannot coax the memories back to life. These walls are made of brick.
The dichotomies of life will just as soon rip out hearts as they will leave a trail of smiles stretched to the moon. You can’t go home again even though you never really left. What a bitch that is! Or taking off in the opposite direction, there exists a burning desire to travel roads of discovery only to find yourself thinking about home, that nagging trap, stuck in the spotlight of all you can never leave behind. Strange dichotomies indeed. Twisted and turned. Upside down. Dizzy. Suitcases overflow with an awkward mix of melon collie, exuberance, sadness, and hope. Dirty little contradictions. Caught in the crosshairs, joy and grief.
Carrie: Nobody needs to be ashamed of crying. We’ve all dampened a pillow. I know I have.
A certainty remains. A beacon of light. For every beginning there is a middle and an end. And it is the end where we inevitably find ourselves. Too late, or never too late.
Carrie: Goodbye, Bountiful. Bye.
-G
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