MOVIE REVIEW : ‘STACKING’ ADMIRABLE IF NOT FULLY SUCCESSFUL

There are so many good things in “Stacking” (selected theaters) that, at the end, when its admirable parts fail to coalesce into an effective whole, it becomes frustrating.

This film, about a young girl’s coming of age on a Montana farm in 1954, has some of the evocative, pared-down detail of a good short story. The writer, Victoria Jenkins, developed the script at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, and she seems to be working out of experiences she knows, personalities she can feel. Focusing on one troubled summer, Jenkins uses a familiar structure. She plays desperate situations against a character of seemingly endless resilience and pluck: Anna Mae Morgan (Megan Follows), a pretty 14-year-old farm girl, battering cheerfully against the inevitable.

We see Anna Mae’s family, ravaged by economic hardship after her father has been hurt in an accident. We follow her sexual awakening, and her seemingly doomed attempts to repair a hay-stacking machine with the undependable Buster McGuire (Frederic Forrest), who was her mother’s rejected suitor. At the end, the world has taken one of those violent wrenches that test everyone, revealing their essence.

This story carries obvious echoes of “Places in the Heart”--to which it is much inferior--and perhaps a few from “Country.” But when Jenkins describes Anna Mae’s travails, you feel she knows these people, understands these events.

Her character detail is rarely sentimental. The injured father (Ray Baker) is no pathetic victim, but an annoying weakling. Once the scion of the area’s richest farm, he has helped it collapse, yet the embers of his arrogance keep flaring. The mother, Kathleen, is a one-time country belle who’s seen her flame gutter and her beaus age. Christine Lahti gives this part a hard edge of bitter, pent-up rage and exhaustion--so weary that her laughs seem squeezed out.

As Anna Mae, Megan Follows is charming but not overcute, and the other actors are good, occasionally extraordinary--not only Lahti, Baker and Forrest, but Irene Dailey as Buster’s mother and Peter Coyote as a magnetic drifter who, like a Fellini apparition spun out of dust and sunshine, appears briefly, charms Kathleen and vanishes down the road.

But though producer-director Martin Rosen clearly respects this material and wants to do his best by it, he may have miscast himself. Rosen has directed two interesting, unusually mature animated features, “Watership Down” and “Plague Dogs”--both based on Richard Adams’ animal fables--but here he seems more effective as producer than director.

Rosen has assembled and cast this project well and found some properly inspiring Montana locations: long stretches of land in mute, overcast colors, surrounded by sheltering banks of mountain, grain waving against the flat-looking sky. But he hasn’t really illuminated the landscape or brought out the pulse of the material. The film lacks texture. The actors are good--but often they seem trapped in the frame, unable to breathe. The rhythm is oddly like that of Rosen’s cartoon features--unspontaneous, metronomic, a little blocky.

Daniel Petrie’s somewhat similar “Square Dance,” from material that had more obvious sentimental traps, seemed earthy and fresh. “Stacking” (MPAA-rated: PG, despite some sexual innuendo) is a more remote, recessive film, even as you watch it. At the end, Anna Mae’s progression has a foreordained feel; not really privy to a struggle or a triumph. Yet it’s a decent film with decent intentions and values. Nowadays, that can sometimes be recommendation enough.