A Comedy That Goes To Your Head

HOMEGROWN
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1998 Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****):  ** 1/2

Billy Bob Thornton has shown his dexterity in roles as widely diverse as the James Carville clone in PRIMARY COLORS and the deadly simpleton in SLING BLADE. In HOMEGROWN he gets a part that seems tailor-made for him. Playing a Northern California pot farmer named Jack, he looks so convincing that you can almost smell the weed on his well-worn jeans.

Director Stephen Gyllenhaal, who co-authored the script with Nickolas Kazan, says in the press kit that he did not envision the story as "a head movie or a toker's paradise." He was inspired by Westerns, and he sees HOMEGROWN as "sort of THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE on a marijuana plantation."

Shot on a pittance but filled with name stars who worked for next to nothing, the movie is a small treat at times but too often wanders as aimlessly as Jack's two stoned helpers, Carter (Hank Azaria) and Harlan (Ryan Phillippe).

As the story begins, the three men are guarding their freshly ripened cash crop while awaiting the arrival of their boss, Malcolm, played in a cameo role by John Lithgow. Malcolm is killed on arrival by his helicopter pilot, who then quickly disappears. The three farmers and their mutual girlfriend Lucy -- pot farmers are a friendly lot -- are left to harvest and sell Malcolm's multi-million-dollar crop. Lucy is played by Kelly Lynch, last seen in the disastrous MR. MAGOO.

Although the story has promise and some good acting, the first two acts serve mainly to mark time until the picture comes alive with some much needed twists and turns in the last act. The director has trouble keeping much momentum going until a group of "rippers," dressed as cops, descend on Malcolm's field to steal the plants. Soon guns are blazing, and the picture takes off.

In addition to Billy Bob's acting talents, the picture has other little delights. Jamie Lee Curtis, for example, plays a self-righteous belle at a flag-draped pot growers' ball. She lectures the marijuana farmers on the virtues of the area's original pot growers, "who had a sense of mission." Looking like a flower child from the 60s, she prances around the dance while bragging that she is now carrying number three in her tummy.

"It's complicated," Lucy says of her affair with one of her many gentlemen friends. "Sometimes complications are interesting." With its underdeveloped script, a few more complications would have helped HOMEGROWN enormously. But any movie with Billy Bob does have its rewards.

HOMEGROWN runs 1:35. It is rated R for profanity, sex, violence, nudity and, what else, lots of dope smoking. It would be fine only for quite mature and older teenagers.