By Armond White

Bonneville
Directed by Christopher N. Rowley

On the road from Pocatello, Idaho, to Santa Barbara, Ca., Bonneville’s trio of middle-aged women (played by Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates and Joan Allen), arrive at the modest accomplishment of understanding themselves better. Bonneville’s plot trigger—that recently widowed Arvilla Holden (Lange) is delivering her husband’s ashes to her stepdaughter—allows the filmmakers to resurrect a largely forgotten but undying movie style.
The road movie was to 1970s American films what film noir was to ’40s and ’50s movies—not a genre, as many people misconstrue, but a storytelling construct that also conveyed a sensibility (that’s why the road movie surfaced within many genres). It expressed post-’60s America’s effort to emotionally travel within and beyond itself, encountering new towns and subcultures. Bonneville’s road trip helps Arvilla and her girlfriends from a largely Mormon community explore the outside, unfamiliar world—an excursion that pulls them out of themselves and revives their spirit.

First-time writer-director Christopher N Rowley titles this exercise after a now- bygone model of middle-class luxury car (which Arvilla drives on the trip) and the Salt Flats setting of the ladies’ first significant personal encounter. The title choice is true to American car culture, recalling the road-movie essence that has been obscured in movies as different yet fascinating as Transamerica, The Brown Bunny, Grace is Gone, even The Darjeeling Limited. Arvilla’s adventure gets back to the basics of necessary social engagement. Rowley’s simple approach shows the road movie’s capacity for political clairvoyance—predicting the need for continued exploration and cultural exchange. It feels like the first healthy sign of post-Borat unification.

The road movie had lost that sense of nationhood with Thelma and Louise—not a feminist film but an action movie that exploited the potential biases of feminism. Rowley’s strong yet diverse female characters rectify that setback. Bates and Allen do subtler versions of their usual brassy and timid shtick through Rowley’s plain yet unabashedly revealing dialog. (Only Christine Baranski’s farcical evil stepdaughter strikes a false note.) Lange, who always leads with her emotions, makes Arvilla fragile yet iron willed. Her face is weathered and buckled but her beauty has turned inward; experience glows from inside.

Arvilla trades a gentle, hard-luck expression with Bo (Victor Rasuk), the mixed-race young man who changed her busted tire on the Salt Flats, creating a perfect moment of American sympathy. They see inside each other and the man/woman, black/white, mother/son and lover/neighbor possibilities vibrate like a purring car engine. It gives this modest road movie a vast horizon.