Local Hero
Local Hero (1983) is above all whimsical, and if you are going to hold it to strict comedic standards or to serious message standards, you’ll be disappointed. A young corporate buyer (Peter Riegert) is sent from Houston to Scotland to buy up a village and everything around it for a huge oil port. But nothing goes according to plan or prediction. We get fair warning of this when Mac meets his Scottish counterpart, a twit. Then the villagers regard corporate greed as their ally, and they secretly plot to get as much from the oil company as possible. And the hot shot young oil executive falls under the spell of the village, starts collecting sea shells, and loses his edge as a negotiator. This film goes for smiles rather than belly laughs, and the payoffs are subtle. My favourite exchange was a minor one at the local dance. The village punk had been dancing energetically with the oil company twit, she in her spikey hair and leather, he in his tweed suit, when her boyfriend in the band asked why she was going after the twit. She answered, “Because he’s different.” That is the kind of thing that keeps people going back to this movie, I’ll wager. It is light fare, with a little environmental substance, but making a charming movie is no mean feat.
Jim Bell