Local Hero (1983)

Ten weeks of crime, greed and men ruining themselves for money, and then this. It is the deliberate breath in the middle of the run, and it is not soft. Local Hero is about exactly the same subject as Fargo and A Simple Plan, which is what money does to people, and it simply refuses to be grim about it. The villagers are not noble innocents. They want the money badly and they negotiate hard. The joke is that the American is the one going native.

Bill Forsyth's comedy works by never pushing. Jokes are set up and then left alone for twenty minutes before they pay off. A rabbit, a motorcycle that keeps appearing, a man counting the money he expects. Nobody in the film is stupid and nobody is a villain, including the oil company. Even Burt Lancaster's tycoon turns out to be a lonely man who mostly wants to look at the sky.

And it earns its ending honestly. Mac goes home, and the last few minutes are among the quietest and saddest in any comedy. The film understands that you can glimpse a completely different life, know it was real, and still not be able to take it. That is a harder and more adult idea than most films twice its weight attempt.

The film keeps swapping who wants what. Mac arrives wanting to close the deal and go home. The villagers want to be bought out and get rich. Ben, who lives on the beach in a shack, is the only holdout, and he does not want money at all. Everyone is quietly trying to trade the life they have for the one they think they should want.

Watch the phone box, which becomes the emotional centre of the whole picture. It is the only line back to Houston, it is on a wall by the sea, and by the end it is the place a man calls when he wants to hear a village he will never live in. The final shot of the film is that phone ringing with nobody there.

Happer, the oil billionaire obsessed with the night sky, could easily have been a joke and Burt Lancaster refuses to play him as one. He has money, therapy he does not need and no one to talk to. When he finally arrives in the village he is the happiest man in it within about an hour, which tells you what the film thinks about wealth.

There is no dramatic reversal at the end, no speech, nobody stops a deal at the last moment with a moral argument. Things resolve for practical reasons and slightly by accident. Forsyth's whole method is to let life be a bit shapeless and find the feeling in what is left over.