Local Hero and the Art of Not Much Happening
I had seen Local Hero once, in my twenties, and remembered only a telephone box and a beach. Watching it again on a cold April evening, with rain on the window, I understood why so little of the plot had stayed with me. Very little of the plot is the point.
The setup is simple enough to fit in a sentence. A young executive at a Texas oil company, who prefers to do business by phone, is sent to a village on the west coast of Scotland to buy the whole place for a refinery, mostly because his boss, played by Burt Lancaster, thinks his surname sounds Scottish. It does not. The first act gets him from a glass tower to a rented car to a fog-bound road where he and his local colleague hit a rabbit, and then to the village hotel, where the man who runs the bar is also the accountant who will negotiate against him.
What I loved this time was the texture. The film takes its time with the weather, the light at ten in the evening, the sound of the sea against the harbor wall. People in the village are not quaint; they are quietly, cheerfully mercenary, and the joke is that they want to sell more than the oil man wants to buy. Lancaster, in his handful of scenes, is wonderful: a tycoon who cares more about comets than about profit, undergoing abuse therapy from a man he pays to insult him.
The music is a soft synthesizer score that sounds exactly like 1983 and somehow does not date. I found myself relaxing in a way that most films do not allow. Nobody is in danger. Nobody is going to be chased. The only tension is whether a man will remember to look up at the sky.
I stopped the disc once to make more tea and came back to find I had not missed anything, which in this film is a compliment. If you are tired, and the week has been loud, this is the one. I went to bed at eleven feeling as if I had been somewhere.