AS WE see from The Yellow Handkerchief, there’s something absolutely immortal about a corny idea. Pete Hamill (thanks to reporter Nicole Lyn Pesce for tracing this story) once took a barroom anecdote he heard and sold the story to Reader’s Digest. Later, he spun that story into a novel. It was filmed in short form on an ABC summer-replacement anthology show in June 1972 with James Earl Jones. Next came the Tony Orlando megahit “Tie a Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” as persistent as cholera. Yoji Yamada, auteur of the beloved Tora-San series, spun this urban legend into what is supposedly a very touching feature film in 1977. More than 30 years later, here it is again under the title The Yellow Handkerchief. Two years in the can since it was made hasn’t added to the film’s freshness. The Yellow Handkerchief comes with a pedigree—and whiskers and a cane.
British director Udayan Prasad worked with renowned cinematographer Chris Menges, who oversees this odyssey of three displaced persons on a slow-speed journey through indie-movie-friendly Louisiana. Menges’ eye is excellent: a golden refinery twinkles in the background like a fairy castle; the picturesque rot of post-Katrina riverscapes looks both sad and fertile. Menges captured that Louisiana light as far back as Shy People in 1987, and he knows his job, What’s new is some limited digital tweaking to get the yellow motif of the film up-front. Being Menges, he doesn’t give the cast jaundice.
That’s about as much praise as The Yellow Handkerchief is going to get from this corner. William Hurt, doing his best to be Robert Duvall, shows a bald pate and a handlebar mustache as Brett, an ex-con who hooks up with a pair of mismatched runaways who are driving south in a vintage convertible. At the wheel is an oversensitive but artistic gawky kid named Gordy (William Redmayne, Angel Clare in TV’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles—a British actor adding to the dislocated quality of this independent feature). The other is Martine (Kristen Stewart), a neglected kid. Stewart’s newfound fame in the Twilight series got this film released. Once again, she’s pantomiming the kind of girl whose legs don’t seem to be the same length, who is shy about either her mouth or her teeth. (Taylor Swift’s parody of Stewart’s acting as lip-chewing on Saturday Night Live should really stop Stewart doing this in the future.) Martine is so underwritten, Stewart has to fill up the role with mannerism. And there’s enough mannerism in The Yellow Handkerchief already; despite near-constant momentum on the road, the film never seems to go anywhere.
So what was the crime that sent Brett up the river for six years? Ah, that would be telling. Not telling is the purpose of the awkward, nonstop flashbacks with the lady in Brett’s past, Maria Bello. I realize we’re supposed to be kind to indies, but one detail—about the supposed possibility of miscarriage after an abortion—seems to be the sound of some anti-choice tub-thumping. No wonder the cast keeps getting lost on the road to New Orleans. No one in this movie, except for the walk-ons and one-line-bearing local actors—seems connected to this landscape at all.
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
THE YELLOW HANDKERCHIEF (PG-13; 102 min.), directed by Udayan Prasad, written by Erin Dignam, photographed by Chris Menges and starring William Hurt and Kristen Stewart, opens March 5 at Mtn. View 16 and Winchester 21 in San Jose.
