Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero has a lighthearted tone that belies the sharpness of its social and class-conscious comedy. It begins in Houston, with Knox Oil executive “Mac” MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) tasked with having to convince the residents of Ferness, a seaside Scottish village, to sell their land in order to make way for a refinery. Mac gets the job for no other reason than his superiors, among them the company’s chief, Happer (Burt Lancaster), think that his name will appeal to locals. As Mac is briefed about the job, he’s told that he cannot use his usual tactics of merely negotiating a quick land sale via a phone call to individuals from more impoverished nations. After all, the Scots look like him, and as such will require a modicum of respect that the oil company has clearly not extended to anyone whose first language is something other than English.
Dispatched to Ferness, Mac is set up from the start to play the urban, bloodthirsty capitalist determined to oust eccentric villagers from their quaint family homes. Yet Forsyth flips that script almost from the outset, showing how quickly Mac is smitten with the natural beauty of the area and plugs into the slower-paced life style there, while the locals hilariously jump at the chance to get a massive buyout from an oil conglomerate, feigning disinterest solely to drive up their asking price. This inversion of expectations forms the bedrock of Local Hero’s wry comedy, which sees Mac increasingly wracked with guilt over potentially expelling people who he comes to like from their homes, and those very people talking among themselves about all the luxuries they intend to buy with their settlement money.
Local Hero’s comedy is subtle, predicated on dramatic irony and the restrained games that both Mac and the Scots play with each other. That sense of humor, all insinuation and gesture, often plays out visually, from gags that take aim at Mac’s obliviousness—as in a scene where he converses with one local in the foreground and fails to notice dozens of residents leaving the church behind him—to the exaggerated gestures of Lancaster’s oilman, whose body language communicates both his authoritarian command and his quirky distractedness.
The man’s eccentricity is most apparent in his overriding interest in star-gazing, a subject that he takes such a keen interest in that, in addition to charging Mac with buying out the people of Ferness, he also instructs his employee to “keep an eye on Virgo” and alert him of any potential comet sightings. For an oil tycoon, Happer is oddly affable, though the extent to which the entirety of Local Hero follows forth from both his commercial and hobbyist whims is another of Forsyth’s clever structural tricks, recasting the protagonist’s journey as one not of self-discovery or reflection but of catering to the true powers that be.
Even the film’s ending, perhaps too tweely fanciful from a distance, fails to follow the expected path of Mac’s arc. For if Local Hero ends happily, it does so for nearly everyone except Mac, whose mission is successful yet benefits everyone but himself. It’s a sly critique on Forsyth’s part of the unequal rewards of labor, as Mac does all the work but ends up the middleman of his own story. Local Hero’s unhurried pace, pleasingly odd cast, and moments of gorgeous pastoralism gives it a lightweight, effervescent quality, but the barbed undercurrent of its social critique makes Forsyth’s intimate comedy one of the most insightful films of the 1980s.
Image/Sound
Chris Menges’s cinematography looks resplendent on Criterion’s Blu-ray, which is sourced from a 2K restoration by Goldcrest Films. The skies in the natural location shots pulse with the most vivid of blue hues, while the exaggerated lighting and color schemes that mark the film’s interiors shine just as brightly. There are no visible scratches or debris throughout, and the depth of image detail testifies to the carefully composed beauty of such an ostensibly innocuous, small-scaled comedy. The mono soundtrack ably balancing dialogue with songwriter Mark Knopfler’s score, which is mixed dynamically in order to reveal its careful blending of Celtic folk, laidback jazz, and the occasional burst of rock.
Extras
An audio commentary with Forsyth and critic Mark Kermode is heavy on production details while also, true to the film’s wandering spirit, prone to diversions and wistful appreciations of Local Hero’s subtler visual and verbal jokes. An interview with Forsyth and critic David Cairns gives an overview of the film’s themes and formal elements, which the director reveals were celebrated by no less an authority than Michael Powell. The rest of the extras consist of archival interviews and documentaries on Forsyth, Chris Menges, and Local Hero, each running nearly an hour in length and extensively covering the production, from the film’s writing to its critical and commercial success. Each of these features, recorded mostly in the space between the releases of Local Hero and Comfort and Joy, testify to the seismic impact of Forsyth’s breakout films on the Scottish film industry. An accompanying booklet contains an essay by film scholar Jonathan Murray that likewise analyzes Local Hero as well as the broader outlines of Forsyth’s career and its popularization of Scottish cinema.
Overall
Bill Forsyth’s whimsical but satirical masterpiece contains riches far deeper than its deceptively simple surface might suggest, and Criterion’s Blu-ray, with its superb A/V transfer and wealth of extras, pays tribute to this small film’s profound influence.
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Okay, it’s four years later, but a quick question. I’m treading lightly for fear of spoilers, but can you hear the phone?