Where to begin with Ramin Bahrani's ghoulish new film, as self-consciously American as an apple pie laced with firecrackers and a handgun? Why not the start, an insultingly programmatic home movie of Iowan seed farmer Henry Whipple (Dennis Quaid, inexplicably doing Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces) joshing with his two legacy-squandering boys, one an all-state football star turned mountaineer, the ingrate, and the other a NASCAR hopeful portentously named Dean (Zac Effron). Last seen aping Kiarostami in Goodbye Solo, Bahrani can't decide this time if he's making a bad Nicholas Ray movie —all lusty men, wayward youngsters, and maimed bodies —or a ham-fisted satire of Reagan's "Morning in America" ad, exposing the seedy underbelly of the smiling Midwestern farmer. Either way, there's little room in his America for women: Heather Graham and Maika Monroe have the most to do as a pair of tragic blondes; you can't blame poor Efron for failing to tell them apart at one point, since they're both playing The Decatur Broad at different ages. (At least Graham gets a hilarious sex scene in front of the family corn mound, unsubtly rhymed with Efron's fistfight in the cornstalks a bit later on.) If there's any pleasure to be had here it's in the howlers, none better than Dean's damning assessment of his errant brother: "Why do you think he's on top of a mountain, and never calls?"
Review of At Any Price
