Is this really America?

Yep, everything in this movie was pretty familiar to me... none of it rang false. I've had a lot of those conversations... or non-conversations. The two idiot brothers who fixate on driving times... they're caricatures but still, I've met them. It's all a hilarious dark comedy... much like real life.

I don't feel it's exaggerated at all. I think this movie was pitch-perfect and captured much of a rural Midwestern farming community. And this is coming from someone who normally hates Alexander Payne movies.


My mother's side of the family is from Iowa...German Lutherans who farmed. Her brother, my uncle, makes Bruce Dern's character look like person of the year. The man is closing in on 80, never married no kids. He lives like a hermit. My relatives who are still in the county who own a Ford dealership because they don't farm have disowned him. You ask them if they are related and they say no. My uncle has threatened everyone with lawsuits over nothing, threatened to shoot people with shot guns. He's a hoarder and through his own negligence, the family home he's lived in all his life burned down because he was heating it improperly. Another family took him in for a time but he was so cheap and ungrateful they had him leave. He now lives in a trailer with no heat, phone, electricity or TV. He'll waste gas and drive halfway across the county to get a free meal from some announcement in the paper.

Since my mother's passing and me having to deal with people in her hometown it's pretty much another world. People live their whole lives never leaving the county. They can talk about mundane things for hours...travel, weather, crops, land prices. Peopke and families hold grudges for decades over the dumbest things. They really hold on to judging people by their religion (Lutheran vs Catholic) and ethnicity (German vs Swedish). They know everybody's business and gossip but act as if they are above it. My uncle was going to church regularly and there was talk of intervening but no one would step up and try to help him over the years. He was injured in the house fire and refused to move into a facility that would take care of him because it seems he hates everyone.

Frankly, to live in a rural farming community like my mother's would be my version of hell. Hypocrites, religious zealots, too many town weirdos. Despite that, Payne made a movie for me that was truthful and entertaining.



Yolanda was a much better listener.

It was a great deception of small town America. My mom's family lives in a farming town in Missouri and life there is so different. The local bar is the town hangout and almost everyone goes to church on Sundays. High school sports and the Town Fair are the biggest events of the year. A lot of people are hit hard by poverty and more and more people move out each year to find a better job in the city. One thing especially true in the movie was addiction. Kids turn to alcohol and drugs because there is nothing else there to do.