The basic story/plot here is stagy, melodramatic, and sentimentalized, evincing a superficiality that makes it difficult to stay with the movie for sufficient exposure to realize what Geraldine Page is creating in it as an actor. What she's doing in this movie is stupendous, one of the few performances ever by an American actor which stacks up against the best that the Brits can do. For me the movie then progressed on two levels: one carrying a mundane, sentimental story which barely engages; the second a mesmerizing and utterly believable journey in the company of a dauntless old woman traveling to bring her life to a satisfactory completion (all things considered). Toward the end, one expects death but gets life, carried on the wings of perhaps the best acting performance ever delivered in an American movie.
Review of The Trip to Bountiful
