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In The Road To Galena, farmers plant a vast crop of clichés

In Joe Hall's melodrama, a small town boy will literally spend 20 years pursuing misguided big city dreams instead of going to therapy

By Mark Keizer | July 8, 2022 | 1:00pm

Film Reviews Unknown

In The Road To Galena, farmers plant a vast crop of clichés

(from left) Ben Winchell and Aimee Teegarden in Joe Hall’s The Road To Galena. Photo: AVA Independent

The Road To Galena is not the first movie to transplant a humble farm boy from his idyllic life in the heartland to the Big City where siren songs of money and success seduce him into forgetting from whence he came. Nor is it the first movie where a fretful farm wife sits at the kitchen table pouring over the family checkbook while her husband, fingernails dirty and forehead caked with sweat, toils underneath his pickup truck. The Road To Galena is not, therefore, a movie of firsts. It is a movie of tropes and clichés that argues, with generic earnestness and a near-total lack of surprise, that the city is a corrupting influence compared to the nurturing, sun-drenched simplicity of the country.

It’s obvious where young Maryland farmer, Cole (Ben Winchell), will end up from the moment we meet him, his best darn gal Elle (Aimee Teegarden from NBC’s Friday Night Lights), and his best darn friend Jack (Will Brittain), walkin’ along the train tracks and chuckin’ rocks during magic hour. A country boy at heart, Cole wants only to attend agriculture school then return to the waiting arms of Elle where he’ll “shake this place up and show ’em how it’s really done!” His regret-filled, banker father (Jay O. Sanders, always a pro) prefers that his son show a little more ambition, pressuring him to “find a major that will give you more options.” So Cole attends the University of Maryland, then gets a full ride scholarship to Georgetown Law. But the deeper he gets into his law career, the further away he gets from the farm life he swore he’d return to.

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First-time feature writer/director Joe Hall is not asking Cole to decide between two possible life paths. He’s asking him, and us, to choose between two distinctly American value systems, which only undercuts any chance that Cole’s story will resonate on a universal level. His journey from noble tiller of the soil to wealthy collector of cars, homes, and paychecks takes about 20 years in the story’s timeline, which means he gets to have it both ways: He can return to his childhood backwater of Galena after becoming so obscenely wealthy at his big deal D.C. law firm that he can probably buy the entire, depressed town.

If the film is suggesting that we should suck those evil American corporations dry, then scamper home with their money, well, it’s hard to quibble with that. But the argument the film makes is so stacked in favor of rural life that its moralizing takes on the heavenly hue of a faith-based drama. When Cole’s extended absence drives Elle into the arms of Jack and deprives his mother (Jill Hennessey) of money for her cancer treatment, one can only deduce that Cole’s fancy college education ruined his relationship and will possibly kill his mother. And when he discovers Elle’s cheating and his mother’s cancer in the same afternoon, in back-to-back scenes, it sends the film down the road to melodrama.

At Georgetown, Cole charms a fellow law student, the frosty, ambitious, Sarah (Alisa Allapach) with lines like, “if you haven’t seen the light hit off the wings of the snow geese in the winter, you haven’t lived.” The power-suited, career-obsessed opposite of Cole, Sarah introduces him to a weird game called “tennis” and when she tells Elle about her early fencing career, the down-home farm girl admits she doesn’t know what fencing is. Here on the farm, ignorance is a sign of virtuousness and these simple country folk are too busy tending to God’s unspoiled land to know what an “at will” employee is, or to see that a company named AgriCon, like, you know, a portmanteau of “agriculture” and “con men,” may not have Jack’s best interest at heart as he tries to save his failing farm.

The foregrounding of bank loans and foreclosures, topics covered much more effectively elsewhere, including 1984's trifecta of depressing farm dramas, Country, Places In The Heart and The River, has one positive. It allows us to see more of the terrific Brittain with his confident Brad Pitt stride and flat, yet expressive, voice. The pedestrian Winchell plays Cole over a 20-year span, although he’s more credible as the younger, aw-shucks Cole than the older, Managing Partner Cole. Either way, Winchell’s boyish face and overwrought delivery makes it hard to connect with him over the course of the film’s slow moving and bloated running time.

The Road to Galena | Official Trailer (HD) | Vertical

Indeed, Hall, who directed only a handful of shorts before making his feature debut here, falls needlessly in love with every drone shot and Norman Rockwell interior with sunbeams blasting through the window. This is a film that asks, why use one establishing shot when you can use three? One lengthy and unnecessary scene involving a character in close-up, contemplating suicide, is just Hall playing to the back row in pure Movie of the Week fashion. The lines of conflict in his script are too often thick and schematic, as when Sarah agrees, to Cole’s dismay, to represent the unethical AgriCon, because money is money. Hall even takes the outdated Magical Negro trope for a light spin courtesy of two-time Grammy Award winner Jennifer Holliday, playing a wisdom-spouting waitress at the local diner.

The Road To Galena is about recognizing what gives someone personal satisfaction and then having the courage to sacrifice material possessions to pursue it. It’s a worthwhile message that’s subtextually framed and blandly presented as an American culture clash rather than as a relatable moral dilemma. The fact that it takes Cole 20 years to realize where his heart lies makes you wonder if he should have just seen a therapist to work on his daddy issues and saved himself 15 years of existential suffering.