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Take one small town/snow-covered wasteland (ibid. FARGO, THE SWEET HEREAFTER (same author yes), A SIMPLE PLAN, NOBODY'S FOOL). Add the "intellectual" ramblings of a college prof who keeps prating on about "story" and "character":
'Imagine that this were a story about my brother, unlike my own story, in which I am a character, but I am really also a character in his story, story is very important in movies now, not like the recent efforts of mainstream Hollywood to cash in on slick editing and so on. Oh yeah, but anyway, I'm a character...'
...which veers disturbingly close to shouting at the audience that it shouldn't suspect that neither of these things really exist here. (Apart from trying to cash in on the recent vogue that has given hippies lacking even the talent to scam their way into university teaching positions -- elective, presumably -- the chance to tour auditoriums under the moniker "Storyteller.")
Then populate the town with saintly, long-suffering women and evil, nasty, brutish, unseeing, unthinking men. What do you get? "CommodityFest 98." This so-called movie is a compendium of current (and inherited) trends, and items from magazine "In" lists, insultingly attempting to pass itself off as some deep drama with a potent message. It's overlong and disconnected, like most Schrader films, and, on the rare occasion it stops to make a point, is just dumb. At one point, Mary Beth Hurt scolds Nolte by simply saying "Shame on you" repeatedly. Shame on YOU, Mr. Schrader -- you should have been standing there.
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