Local Hero.

During an industrial video outlining the increasing productivity and capabilities of the Knox oil company, the CEO falls asleep at the head of the table. The rest of the board members continue the meeting in a hushed whisper, not wanting to wake the executive. Thus begins Bill Forsyth's delightful film Local Hero.

Mac MacIntyre is sent by the Knox oil company to negotiate a purchase of land in a small Scottish town. More specifically, for the purchase of the entire town and beach, in order to build a refinery in its place. That's the story of Local Hero. If that's the story of Local Hero, why is that about forty or so minutes into the movie the local liaison for the purchase, Urquhart, discusses with the landowners what the tactic should be to draw out the bid? Isn't Mac there to make a bid?

The purchase of land in Local Hero is about as important to the movie as the money is in Psycho. The land purchase provides narrative propulsion, which then the characters take over as they become the principal agenda. The story is never fully phased out or abandoned, and devices stretch out from it that affect the characters, but it somehow becomes a detail not a focus. Sometimes a film will use a narrative catalyst to divulge the inner complexity of a character, and as the character obsesses over a personal vision the audience learns about the character. There's a lot of crime drama that follows that path. Local Hero isn't that direct. The story is an appendage to the characters, and the story flows on outward and inward channels.

It's spontaneous and shapeless. It taps directly into the characters, and sometimes it requests the viewers to become substitute decision makers. For example there is no motivation given to Mac's languidness in business matters. He doesn't play hardball and he hates business games; the only slight explanation is that he's more of a telecommunications man and usually handles all the deals over the phone in a matter of hours. The solution is natural and obvious: he's become enamored with the small-time beach-front lifestyle. The film doesn't tell you this, but it shows you what happens because he has these feelings.

As the days creep by without a resolution, finally Urquhart approaches Mac with a proposal which is quickly sorted out without prolonged haggling. It's an oil company paying off the townspeople, millions of dollars are being offered, the townspeople are ecstatic about the deal, it's not Mac's own money, and what they're asking for isn't beyond reason. It's an easy, perfect deal situation. With one snag: the reclusive, eccentric beach owner who lives in a hut on the beach and won't sell the land that has belonged to his family for four centuries. That's a problem for the deal, but it's not a crisis moment for the movie.

The things that the film is not create a void filled by the things the film is, and that substance is the mannerisms, personalities, and incidents of all the characters in the film. They exist inside the plot like the characters exist inside their town, living off the environment circumstantially without being wholly possessed by it. This is the film's triumph, the way it doesn't saddle the locals with a single voice, the way it doesn't rely on them to buttress its motifs; it allows too for the oil company to be ambitious without being faceless, to be human willed and malleable; and this strategy exists in the tiny details too, like a beautiful woman with webbed toes, and a psychologist that is truly troubled.

No conclusion is reached at the end of the film about anyone or anything. No character is a single attribute and no problem has a single answer. The film would have faltered if it had conceded a single judgment, but in its total refusal to do so it creates the perfect void to be filled by the audience later, who exist too in the place they are, and know too the happenings of Local Hero. It's a film that makes you feel like you've lived it by having seen it.