Shirley Knight plays a newly-pregnant suburban housewife who's slow desperate panic has driven her to flee the existence laid out ahead of her. As she takes off in a station wagon, we don't know where she's going and neither does she. She has taken no luggage on her journey but nevertheless brings with her a lot of baggage. Much of her character is revealed during sporadic calls home to her husband who is not so much distraught as he is abusive. These conversations, because of their first-rate execution, are charged with realism.
She soon picks up hitch-hiker James Caan, who turns out to be a former football player who's head injury during a game has left him mentally deficient, a large child. Soon after his injury and subsequent surgery, the college he had played for stuffed 1000 dollars into his pocket and washed their hands of him, casting him adrift to fend for himself. With apparently no family to look after him, Knight's character unwittingly becomes his de facto mother.
Knight is unwilling to take on motherhood in any form, and is already considering an abortion. In another sense she tries several times to "abort" Caan's character as well. She often abandons him roadside as she becomes overwhelmed by fear and desperation at the grim inescapable realization that she is his only help. And she can't even help herself.
Robert Duvall rounds out the cast as an abusive hard-worn motorcycle cop who, as another reviewer has noted, represents the husband Knight has run away from. Acting is first-rate all around, as is Coppola's direction in a film that was definitely a '60's film yet far ahead of its time. Certainly the finest role for Shirley Knight, an actress who definitely proved up to be to the challenge. Anyone who has suffered through one too many Hollywood "feel-good" movies will find welcome relief in The Rain People- bleak but real and utterly fascinating.
She soon picks up hitch-hiker James Caan, who turns out to be a former football player who's head injury during a game has left him mentally deficient, a large child. Soon after his injury and subsequent surgery, the college he had played for stuffed 1000 dollars into his pocket and washed their hands of him, casting him adrift to fend for himself. With apparently no family to look after him, Knight's character unwittingly becomes his de facto mother.
Knight is unwilling to take on motherhood in any form, and is already considering an abortion. In another sense she tries several times to "abort" Caan's character as well. She often abandons him roadside as she becomes overwhelmed by fear and desperation at the grim inescapable realization that she is his only help. And she can't even help herself.
Robert Duvall rounds out the cast as an abusive hard-worn motorcycle cop who, as another reviewer has noted, represents the husband Knight has run away from. Acting is first-rate all around, as is Coppola's direction in a film that was definitely a '60's film yet far ahead of its time. Certainly the finest role for Shirley Knight, an actress who definitely proved up to be to the challenge. Anyone who has suffered through one too many Hollywood "feel-good" movies will find welcome relief in The Rain People- bleak but real and utterly fascinating.