Beneath the Harvest Sky, review. [SPOILER ALERT]

The overall aesthetics of the film were fresh and captivating. The storyline was an important one – two young men who work potato fields and hustle prescription drugs in Northern Maine, saving up for future investments. The emphasis on male friendship was raw, more real than the mainstream Hollywood bromance. This male friendship and their desires to succeed, dreaming for a better life, these were all positive aspects of the film and it really shed light on some of the struggles young men face in poor, rural communities. There was definitely some value to this film in terms of exposing these hidden lives.

Casper and Dominic are the main characters of the film. Dominic seems to be raised by a single mother, while Casper’s family is dysfunctional and he winds up smuggling drugs over the Canadian border for his father. What drives these guys to work in potato fields and smuggle drugs is their desire to move out of rural Maine to the big city of Boston. This story is full of hope and really hits home in terms of the realities of life in Maine. So many of us declare in high school that we are going to get out of Maine as soon as we graduate, as if life out there is better than this small-town stuff.

I was expecting to bear witness to more of the realities around drug use in these rural communities. The film did a great job of exposing drug trafficking as a legitimate source of income, but it did little to shed light on addiction or the reasons why people, and men, use in Maine. I’m guessing this was probably for the sake of the story and the fact that the actors were actually very involved in getting to know community members of Van Buren. You have to be sensitive to the generalizations you make about these small towns when filming so intimately with them. The two main characters smoked pot, but the whole culture of drug use was really missing from this film about hustling drugs.

One aspect of Beneath the Harvest Sky that pissed me off had to do with Casper’s girlfriend. At one point in the film, the two are hanging out at in a bedroom. She has already revealed her supposed pregnancy. In one part of this scene Casper is telling her that he is going to take care of her, financially, thanks to the drug money. But then the scene turns rape-y. He demands that she take her pants off (and I must’ve missed something that explained his intentions before this part) but she protests, and it is declared that she is lying about being pregnant because she is on her period. I was pretty dissatisfied with this scene because I feel like it confirms some stereotypes about women lying to men to keep them around and that men really can’t trust women. This sort of thing probably does happen in reality, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Sources:
http://youtu.be/oz8xmCSGRG4