"Sommersby"
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
                  On "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM
                        February 6, 1993

    In classic Hollywood films two of the genres that feature
women in central roles are the tear-jerkers or "weepies" in which
a woman has to sacrifice her own happiness in order to be
redeemed,  and the "film noir" those dark postwar gangster films
with a central female character who poses a mystery to be
unraveled by the male from whose viewpoint the story is told.
Perhaps it's because my Women and Film class has been looking at
such films lately, but the thing that struck me most strongly
about "Sommersby," the new film starring Richard Gere and Jodie
Foster, is the way in which it reverses both these gender
conventions, and  some others as well.

    Jack Sommersby is a Tennessee plantation owner who went off
to fight in the Civil War; two years after the war he has not yet
returned.  His wife, Laurel, and the others in the town believe
that he's probably dead and she has told another man, Orin, that
if Jack doesn't return after seven years she'll marry him.  But
as the film opens Jack Sommersby comes home--or does he?  There's
something odd about him; he looks like himself, he seems to know
everybody, but he seems so different.  Some folks welcome him
home but others, including Laurel, are less than thrilled to see
him.  Even his own dog greets him with hostility.  Is this really
Jack Sommersby?  Did his war experiences change him so much?  Is
he an imposter?  That's the mystery that, in this reversal of the
film noir convention, Laurel has to unravel.

   Whether he's Jack Sommersby or an imposter he's a decided
improvement over the brutal, n'er-do-well, racist, rich boy who
rode off to war.  His old racist buddies, whose reaction to
Reconstruction is to form the Ku Klux Klan, don't care for the
changes in Jack.  In fact they burn a cross in front of his
house.  His wife, however, is ecstatic about the changes as she
discovers them, for she is a woman with passionate sexual
desires--and, in another reversal of classic Hollywood
conventions, she's allowed to own these desires and not be seen
as a "fallen woman" even though we know that she strongly
suspects that this man is not really her husband.  However "new"
Jack is a passionate and attentive lover to her and their
marriage becomes for the first time a mutually rewarding love
match.  And under his leadership the townspeople, black and
white, work together to pool their meager resources and start to
rebuild the economic base of the town by planting a new crop,
burley tobacco, and rebuild their sense of community and hope for
the future.

    With the mysterious Sommersby  constructed as the object of
investigation and passion,  Laurel is constructed as owning the
interrogating gaze and the desiring gaze--both usually reserved
for the male.  The film's spectators are then positioned to see
things from Laurel's--from a woman's--point of view as we try to
figure out the truth about this man along with her.  That's also
a reversal of the Hollywood norm--and Foster's performance and
character are both strong enough to carry this off.

   The rest of the plot twists and the resolution shouldn't be
told, but it is a tear-jerker and people all over the theater
were snuffling and pulling out kleenex.  For a change the
person doing the sacrificing is not the essentially good woman
who has transgressed and must pay the price, but the man who
does and in so doing becomes ennobled by his sacrifice.

   This film, a remake of the French film "The Return of Martin
Guerre" was directed by British director Jon Amiel and written by
Nicholas Meyer and Sarah Kernochan. It has survived being
transplanted to the soil of the Blue Ridge Mountains in great
style.  It's a visually sumptous film but it does not prettify
the rigors of post-Civil War life.  Both Gere and Foster are
quite wonderful in their roles and are backed up by a strong
supporting cast that includes James Earl Jones in a bravura
cameo performance as a judge.

    I really liked this film; I think you will too.  For the WMNF
Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.