Michael Williams’s OzLand is a well-meaning and forthright fable, and I oh so wanted to like it, because it’s richly filmed out there in the cornfields of post-apocalyptic Kansas, presumably, and it’s got an evocative score with twangy guitars courtesy Keatzi Gunmoney and, some might say, a message or two to impart—that’s God thanked and credited (as co-production designer) at the end. But I had a little trouble with its performers. Not so much Glenn Payne as Emri, one of two travelers heading west, the one with the beard; he’s satisfactory. But Zack Ratkovich as the reader Leif is less convincing. And after a while this earnest film’s ’Wizard of Oz pretentions, distractions, and coincidences become a little too strained. And another thing. If you watched your friend, your only friend, the only other human being left on the planet, slowly being brainwashed by a storybook found in the dirt and debris of an abandoned schoolroom, would you, as a tornado approaches, opt to leave him to face his “destiny” alone, or drag him, kicking and screaming, into the root cellar with you? Tin woodsmen, scarecrows, gutless lions, winged monkeys—they’re all here in some misshapen form and you’ll keep waiting for the image of a witch’s feet sticking out from under a house, as I did. The sad truth is that L. Frank Baum’s perennial story of Dorothy’s phantasmagorical journey to the Emerald City made a fabulous movie the first time around, but would require a much subtler hand to succeed as metaphor. It’s not philosophy we find in OzLand’s cornfields, but merely corn.
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(c) 2015 David N. Butterworth
butterworthdavidn@gmail.com
