Wally Dalton | Through the Shattered Lens

The 1994 made-for-TV movie Deadly Vows opens with a football game.

It’s just a friendly football game in the park. The majority of the players appear to be frat boys. They’re muscular and athletic and they play hard but they’re not professional athletes. However, there is one player that sticks out. Tom Weston (Gerald McRaney) is taking the game very seriously and he is determined to win. He continually begs his team’s quarterback to throw him the ball. When he’s tackled, he staggers back up and run back to the huddle, even though he’s limping and out-of-breath. Again, Tom is taking the game very seriously. Tom is also nearly twenty years older than the other players.

Tom is desperate to prove that he can still keep up with the young guys around him, even though it’s obvious that he can’t. Tom also drives a truck for a living and spends his time on his CB radio, bragging about how good he is at his job and trying to pick fights with anyone who he feels doesn’t treat him with enough respect. Incidentally, Tom is not driving a big truck. He’s driving a small truck. It’s actually more of a van than a truck…..

In other words, Tom is having a midlife crisis.

I think everyone either knows or has, at least, come across someone like Tom Weston. He’s the balding, forty-something guy who brags about how he’s in the best shape of his life and who shamelessly flirts with every young woman that he sees, despite the fact that he’s married to a woman his own age, Nancy (Peggy Lipton). Nancy, for her part, tries to be understanding. Like a lot of insecure men, Tom is a very active gaslighter. Indeed, when Nancy first meets Bobbi (Josie Bisset), she believes Tom when he says that Bobbi is just a friend. Of course, the truth of the matter is that Tom is having an affair and he even married Bobbi a few weeks earlier. Tom’s not just a guy having a mid-life crisis. He’s also a bigamist. And eventually, he’s a murderer.

Deadly Vows is based on the true story of Robert Harnois, a man who is currently in prison for murdering one wife and trying to kill the other. When this film was made, Harnois had not yet been convicted of the murder which is why the character’s name was changed to Tom Weston. The film itself is slightly ambiguous as to the circumstances that led to the murder. While we see Tom reading about it in prison and smirking, we don’t actually see him taking the contract out on the victim’s life. But, in a safely made-for-TV style, it’s pretty clearly implied that Tom hired someone to carry out the murder. (And, in real life, that’s exactly what happened.)

Deadly Vows is, in many ways, a typical made-for-TV true crime film. What sets it apart from other entries in the genre is Gerald McRaney’s chilling performance as Tom Weston. McRaney plays Weston as the type of sociopath who thinks that he can charm his way out of any situation. Instead, most people can see right through him and his manipulative bluster. Indeed, the film portrays Tom as being a very stupid and pathetic man. Unfortunately, one doesn’t have to be smart to hurt other people. Peggy Lipton and especially Josie Bisset both give good performance as well but this film is ultimately dominated by McRaney’s performance as a murderous loser who simply cannot accept that he’s not 22 anymore.

Sometimes, a good film just sneaks up on you.

That was certainly the case with me and East of the Mountains, an independent film which came out last September. I have to admit that the film completely slipped past me when it was initially released. In fact, I didn’t even know that the film existed until it was nominated for Best Motion Picture Drama by the Satellite Awards in December. I wasn’t alone in that. I remember when the Satellite nominations were announced, there were a lot of people who looked at the list of nominees and, upon seeing an unfamiliar title mixed in with West Side Story, The Power of the Dog, and Don’t Look Up, said, “East of what?”

Because I’m always on the lookout for an overlooked gem, I rented East of the Mountains on Prime. I watched it yesterday. My initial reaction was that it was a well-made film, featuring both pretty scenery and an excellent lead performance from veteran actor Tom Skerritt. (Skerritt is also credited as being an executive producer on the film.) I appreciated that, in a time when so many film feels as if they’re at least ten minutes too long, East of the Mountains was a remarkably short film. It only needed 79 minutes to tell its simple but effective story and it didn’t waste a single one of them. At the time, I also thought that the film’s direction was perhaps a bit too low-key for the film to really work. I thought it was a good film but I also thought it was one that I would probably forget about in a day or two.

Instead, the opposite has happened. East of the Mountains has stuck with me. Even as I sit here typing, I can still picture the film’s final few scenes in my head. That’s the type of film that East of the Mountains is. It’s a film that sneaks up on its audience, capturing their attention so subtly that it’s not until several hours later that they realize that they’re still thinking about the film.

Based on a novel by David Guterson, East of the Mountains is a character study. Tom Skerritt plays Ben Givens. Ben is a retired doctor and a veteran of the Korean War. He lives in Seattle. His wife has passed away. He’s estranged from his brother. His daughter is busy with a family of her own. Ben’s only companion is his dog, Rex. When he tells his daughter (played by Mira Sorvino) that he’s planning on going bird hunting for the weekend, she’s concerned. She knows that her father has been depressed. She also knows that Ben has recently been diagnosed with cancer. Ben assures her that he just wants to see his “old stomping grounds” one last time but his daughter worries that Ben may be planning on never coming back.

She’s not wrong. Since we’ve already seen Ben pressing the barrel of a rifle against his forehead, we know that she has every reason to be concerned about his plans. Ben is considering ending it all, east of the mountains where he grew up, fell in love, and experienced his happiest moment. However, from the minute that Ben sets off on what he plans to be his final hunting trip, fate seems to be determined to keep him alive. After his SUV breaks down, he’s given a ride by a mountain climbing couple and their love reminds Ben of when he first met the woman who he would eventually marry. After a run-in with a half-crazed mountain man, Ben loses his prized rifle, the one that was given to him by his father and which Ben planned to use to end his own life. After an unexpected dog fights leads to Ben taking Rex to the local animal hospital, he meets a young veterinarian who can tell that Ben needs someone to talk to.

The plot is rather simple but Tom Skerritt’s performance brings the story a certain depth that it might not otherwise possess. It would be easy to sentimentalize a character like Ben or to portray him as being flawless. Instead, Skerritt plays Ben as someone who is genuinely well-meaning and naturally kid but who also can occasionally be a bit self-absorbed. Watching Ben, one can understand why his brother is estranged from him, which makes their eventual, if rather prickly reunion all the more poignant. (Ben’s brother is well-played by an actor named Wally Dalton. He and Skerritt play off of each other with such skill that it’s hard to believe that they actually aren’t brothers.) The viewer hopes that Ben will find what he needs to find in order to achieve some sort of peace for himself, even if Ben himself doesn’t always seem to be quite sure what that possibly mythical thing would be.

Skerritt’s performance here is comparable to Robert Redford’s turn in All Is Lost, with the main difference being that Ben is far more lost than even Reford’s unnamed sailor. However, much like the sailor in All is Lost, it’s impossible to look away from Ben’s journey. It’s also tempting to compare Skerritt’s performance to Rchard Farnsworth’s Oscar-nominated turn in David Lynch’s The Straight Story. (Indeed, the scene between Skerritt and Dalton is comparable to the final scene between Farnsworth and Harry Dean Stanton.) Much like Farnsworth in Lynch’s film, Tom Skerritt may move slowly but the viewer is always aware of his mind working.

East of the Mountains may sound like a depressing or heavy-handed film but actually it’s not. If anything, it’s life-affirming. The audience is right alongside Ben, learning with him that the world is not as terrible a place as he had convinced himself it was. In the end, the viewer cares about Ben and worries about what his ultimate fate will be. The film’s ending sneaks up on you and it stays with you afterwards.

There is one scene involving a dog fight that is difficult to watch but otherwise, East of the Mountains is a simple but poignant film that deserves more attention than it’s received.