Sunshine State (15)

Creeping shadows in the sunshine state

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Jonathan Romney on 'Sunshine State'

Anthony Quinn on 'Sunshine State'

John Sayles: 'I'm not that famous, so I can say anything I want...'

Edie Falco: The reluctant star

John Sayles's new film is called Sunshine State but there's barely a ray of sun visible in it from start to finish. Its characters may don summer shirts and squint against the light, but the film's look varies between overcast greyness and a hazy sandblasted effect, as though summer passed through long ago and left the film's setting, "a Florida island resort", the worse for wear. Sayles's subject is the way that Florida, living off a fantasy past and selling the dream of an endless vacation idyll, is up for grabs by developers; with an uncertain past and a questionable future, this is more a sunset state.

Sayles is a past master of spirit of place. Where some film-makers like to travel around the US sampling local customs, cuisine and accents, Sayles prefers to sniff out socio-economic patterns. His last film, Limbo, was a sort of existential horror movie which, had it found the audience it deserved, would have irrevocably wrecked the Alaskan tourist trade; but it was also an exhaustive primer in the labour problems in the fish canneries up there. In Sunshine State, he looks at the mall-ification of Florida. The supposed claim to fame of the film's locale, a run-down backwater called Delrona Beach, is its traditional Buccaneer Days festival, an entirely bogus event cooked up by the local Chamber of Commerce.

Sunshine State is one of Sayles's sprawling ensemble pieces, following his Tex-Mex drama Lone Star, and City of Hope, in which the entire population of New Jersey seemed to have been pressed into dramatic service. By comparison, Sunshine State, with only 23 or so speaking roles, suggests the mood of a place emptying out, a landscape that rose out of a swamp and is now about to sink into the sea. There's a gently apocalyptic, end-of-days mood hanging over the film, partly because so many of its characters are elderly and nostalgic.

The story hangs between the fates of two women. Local girl Marly (Sopranos star Edie Falco) has done service as a mermaid in an aquashow: she prides herself on her ability to grin underwater and keep breathing, which rather sums up her present existence. Today she reluctantly runs her family's deadbeat motel, downs tequilas and dreams of escape.

The other woman is Desiree (Angela Bassett) from the island's long-established black enclave, whose family hastily shunted her out of town when she got pregnant. Having given up her theatrical dreams and reconciled herself to working in TV commercials, she returns to town with her dependable anaesthetist husband (James McDaniel), who knows he'll have to patiently smile through the heat as Desiree tries to repair relations with her quietly ferocious mother (the stately, pricelessly wry Mary Alice).

Not all the characters around them come entirely to life. Frustratingly, perhaps the vaguest presence is Timothy Hutton as the easy-going landscaper brought in by the company to carve up the seafront, but whom Marly decides to set her cap at nevertheless. Perhaps, though, we're seeing him through her eyes anyway: the main thing about him is that he won't be in town too long, just like Marly's single-minded young golfer boyfriend who's off on tour, probably never to return. ("Are there, like 'groupies?'" she asks, with disconsolate resignation).

Then there's traumatised 13-year-old black kid Terrell (Alexander Lewis) who kicks the film off by burning down a mock pirate ship. There's local sporting hero Flash (Tom Wright), back in town with a tacky sales agenda. There's Marly's disreputable ex (the inimitably mangle-faced Richard Edson), a failed rock musician who now ekes out a living playing soldiers and pirates in the local theme-park economy. There's ... But this could go on forever. Sayles's films resemble cottage industry initiatives to provide opportunities for enterprising actors.

His ensemble pieces, though, do not have the hit-and-miss, anything-goes hedonism of Robert Altman's comparable films. Sayles always balances his fictional requirements against the political imperative, the need to show us how the world works. Some characters are too much instruments of the message, or laden with responsibility as the conscience of a community, notably Bill Cobbs's venerable doctor. His voice all gravel and gravitas, he embodies the memory of a local black population that thrived as an oasis in Florida's time of segregation but fell apart afterwards. Sayles has an acute sense of such paradox in American society, but tends to undermine his case by putting arguments in the mouths of characters too obviously designed to represent positions. When Ralph Waite drones on as a gruff but good-hearted old redneck – "My day was simpler, you knew where you stood" – we're not watching cinema but creaky theatre. The only time this rhetorical approach really works is when a bunch of wisecracking old golfers led by Alan King play chorus, giving us a jokey, no-nonsense lesson in Floridan history: "The old name means in Seminole, 'You shouldn't go there.'" This is not a great John Sayles film, nowhere near as narratively audacious as Limbo or his Spanish-language drama Men with Guns. But its best performances make it shine. Angela Bassett, who has spent the past few years languishing in an action-glamour bracket, creates a character who has sloughed off her own glamour for resigned domesticity, and now nervously carries her weight of dissatisfaction and unresolved questions: just watch the way her Desiree is forever shifting from foot to foot and biting her tongue. And Edie Falco continues to be the great chameleon: her Marly is a blank, disillusioned stare in a hard sun-bitten face.

There's a wonderful scene where Marly has a crisp, impatient face-off with her ex, fending off his childlike blathering with crisp one-liners; Falco's dry, disbelieving look speaks volumes about their marital history. It's a fabulous example of less-is-more acting. Both actresses, though, have their thunder slightly stolen by Mary Steenburgen's twitchy simpering as the Chamber of Commerce official presiding over the town's phoney pirate pageant; people, she complains, "don't realise how difficult it is to start a tradition".

j.romney@independent.co.uk