Letters from the Big Man
Time Out New York Project: Issue #836, November 10-16, 2011
★★★☆☆
Dir. Christopher Munch. 2011. N/R. 115mins. Lily Rabe, Jason Butler Harner, Isaac C. Singleton Jr.
You know what they say about men with big feet. Artist and scientist Sarah Smith (Rabe) sure does: A loner by nature, she spends much of her time on solo expeditions in the Oregon woods measuring water levels for the government and communing with eight-foot-tall Sasquatches. Wait…what? Writer-director Christopher Munch surely intends the double take when he first shows us one of the hairy, towering forest creatures (a triumph of makeup design) about a quarter of the way through this earnest ecological parable. Up until then, it seems as if we’re watching an intriguingly subdued character study in the Old Joy vein about a lonesome gal and the metaphor-laden landscapes she wanders through. But Munch, it turns out, is after much bigger go-green-damn-you! game.
The bigfeet are actually Zen-like spirits who appear to Sarah with eco-friendly messages — which the movie unfortunately literalizes via several flower-power voiceovers. And in a kooky head-scratcher of a subplot, Sarah’s colleague and love interest (Harner) discovers the existence of a clandestine government agency out to exploit the creatures’ seemingly magical powers. The story’s half-baked environmental themes become more prevalent as Letters from the Big Man progresses to its back-to-nature finale, which unfortunately distracts from Munch’s consistently sure hand with his actors. Rabe, especially, suggests luminous depths of wisdom and experience with each captivating expression; she helps to focus a film that is otherwise lamentably scattershot.—Keith Uhlich
