Sunshine State
Directed by John Sayles.
Starring: Angela Bassett, Edie Falco, James McDaniel
and Ralph White.
Sunshine State is a confident and competent construction, almost Shakespearean in scope and style, of America’s present predicament.
The opening glimpse into history, of flames engulfing the ‘skull and crossbones’ of a Buccaneer’s flag is brought rudely into the present. Now, the destruction of an icon to have been used on Buccaneer’s Day, the annual event of a small coastal town in Northern Florida. The vandal is a painfully adolescent black boy.
A Company of ‘unscrupulous land developers’ moves into town. Simultaneously so does a ‘Man Eating Alligator’ side show. “Nature is overrated”. and the line between ‘greedy developers’ and ‘ordinary folk’ begins to blur.
This very American film traces a historical path through the lives of two families, one white one black. Each with independent and headstrong daughters as the leading protagonists (Angela Bassett and Edie Falco). Both women have not achieved their ‘dream’. The ‘dream’, and its various constructions in time, is the object in this film.
On Lincoln Beach, in the 40s and 50s Black folk, former plantation workers, bought land and developed ‘black community’, in the separatist spirit of the ‘Jim Crow’ laws. Simultaneously White folk, former pulp mill workers were also buying land and pursuing the American dream on Delrona Beach.
What went wrong? What happened? Civil Rights happened.
Sunshine State presents big issues within the context of small town politics and morality and meanwhile challenges a Political Correctness which makes a cigarette smoker feel like a baby strangler.
Lou Crow
