Far From Home (film)
Far From Home is a 1989 Suspense/Independent Film/thriller
(with slasher elements) starring Drew Barrymore, Matt Frewer, Jennifer Tilly,
Dick Miller and the late John Spencer in a cameo role. It centered on a divorced
father who breaks down in a desert town along with his teenage daughter, forced
to stay in a trailer park they attract the intentions of a troubled local who
becomes dangerously fixated on one of them. Barrymore's book, Little Girl Lost,
which describes her battles with addiction, was written around the same time as
this film was made. The film was shot in the Black Rock Desert and in Gerlach,
NV.
Tagline : One boy wants her love. One boy wants her dead.
Cast
Matt Frewer - Charlie Cox
Drew Barrymore - Joleen Cox
Richard
Masur - Duckett
Karen Austin - Louise
Susan Tyrrell
- Agnes Reed
Andras Jones - Jimmy Reed
Dick Miller
- Sheriff Bill Childers
Anthony Rapp - Pinky Sears
Connie Sawyer - Viney Hunt
Jennifer Tilly - Amy
Stephanie
Walski - Sissy Reed
Murrill Maglio - Man in Trailer
Teri Weigel - Woman
in Trailer
Embittered divorced, jounalist/writter Charlie Cox (Matt Frewer) is driving through Banco, Nevada (Gerlach-Empire, Nevada) with his daughter Joleen (Drew Barrymore), who's on the eve of her fourteenth birthday both of whom are coming back from a cross country vacation. Only they run out of gas and become stranded in one of the state's desert towns; Banco currently a murder site involving the shooting of local supermarket owner Ferrell Hogus (being investigated by local Sheriff Bill Childers). Unable to get gas from station manager (and nam war veteran) Duckett, both are forced to spend the night at nearby Palomino Guest Ranch and Trailer Park owned by abusive Agnes Reed, single mother to pre-teen Sissy and her older teenage brother Jimmy who Joleen takes a shine to. However the next day he tries to rape her and she's only saved by his dorky one time childhood friend Pinky Sears, who makes a connection with her. But when she and her dad prepare to leave the next night with fellow travellers; Louise & Amy the carpool is mysteriously destroyed. Clearly someone doesn't want Joleen to leave-ever! Could it be Jimmy out to continue having his way with her? Or is Pinky not as/so innocent as he looks/seems to be?
Plot
A Los Angeles private investigator named Jake 'J.J' Gittes (Nicholson) is hired to spy on Hollis Mulwray, the chief engineer for the city's water department. The woman hiring Gittes claims to be Evelyn Mulwray, Hollis' wife. Mr. Mulwray spends most of his time investigating dry river beds. Mr. Mulwray also has a heated argument with an elderly man. Gittes finally catches Mulwray during an outing with a young blonde and photographs the pair, which becomes a scandal in the press. After the story is published, Gittes learns that the woman who hired him was not the real Evelyn Mulwray.
Clues suggest a scandal in the city government: Despite a serious drought and an expensive proposal to build a new dam, the Water and Power department is dumping fresh water into the ocean at night.
On a tip, Gittes seeks out Mr. Mulwray at a reservoir but finds the police there instead, investigating Hollis Mulwray's death from drowning. When the police speak to Mrs. Mulwray about the death, they assume she hired Gittes, which Gittes corroborates. She thanks him and hires him to investigate what happened to her husband.
Later that night, while breaking into the reservoir's secured area, Gittes is confronted by water department security, Claude Mulvihill, and a thug (a cameo by Polanski himself), who slashes Jake's nose for being a "very nosy fella." Gittes receives a call from Ida Sessions, the woman who was hired to pretend to be Mrs. Mulwray, who suggests that Gittes look at the obituary column. At the water department, Gittes notices photographs of the elderly man Mulwray quarreled with a few days before his death, Noah Cross (Huston). Cross, who is Evelyn Mulwray's father, used to own the water department as Mulwray's business partner. Cross ended his association with the department when the partners sold it to the city.
Cross hires Gittes to find the blonde girl Hollis had been seeing, saying that she might know what happened to him. Acting on a hint from Sessions, Gittes begins to unravel an intricate water scandal. Cross and his partners have been forcing farmers out of their land so they can buy it cheap, after which a newly-built (and controversial) dam and water system would start redirecting much of L.A.'s water supply to that land, dramatically increasing its value. Since Cross wants no record of such transactions, he has partnered with a retirement home community in such a way that many of the eldest residents within (one of whom is mentioned in the obituary column) would legally, but unknowingly, own the land.
Gittes follows Evelyn to a middle-class house and sees Mulwray's girlfriend crying. Evelyn claims this is her sister, who was crying because she had just learned about Hollis' death. Later that night, Sessions is murdered. Escobar points out that the coroner's report proves that salt water was found in Mulwray's lungs even though the body was found in a freshwater reservoir.
Gittes returns to Evelyn's mansion, where he discovers a pair of eyeglasses in a garden saltwater pond. Gittes confronts Evelyn, who reveals that the blonde girl, Katherine, is both her sister and her daughter; Gittes asks Evelyn if her father raped her and she shakes her head no. Gittes then chooses to help Evelyn escape. Evelyn remembers that the eyeglasses could not have been her husband's because they are bifocals. Gittes arranges for the two women to flee to Mexico and instructs Evelyn to meet him at her butler's address in Chinatown. Evelyn leaves, and Cross arrives with Mulvihill under the pretext that Gittes has found the girl; however, Gittes confronts Cross with the accusation of murder and the glasses. Mulvihill takes away the eyeglasses that are the only physical evidence. Cross forces Gittes to take him to the girl. When Gittes arrives at Evelyn's hiding place in Chinatown, the police are already there.
When Cross approaches the girl, demanding custody of her, Evelyn pushes him back, shoots him in the arm and starts her car. The police arrest Gittes, and as Evelyn drives away, they open fire and Evelyn is shot and killed. Cross clutches Evelyn's shrieking daughter as a devastated Gittes is comforted by his associates, one of them saying, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."
The plot is based in part on real events that formed the California Water Wars, in which William Mulholland acted on behalf of Los Angeles interests to secure water rights in the Owens Valley.
Chinatown was the first part of a planned trilogy written by Robert Towne about J.J. Gittes and L.A. The second part, The Two Jakes, about the natural gas business in Los Angeles in the 1940s, was directed by Nicholson and released in 1990. However, this film's commercial and critical failure scuttled plans to make Cloverleaf, a film about the development of the area's freeway system (this plot actually became the basis of the live action/animation film Who Framed Roger Rabbit,
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