The screenplay for The Road to Galena is littered with characters who are more interesting and idiosyncratic than writer/director Joe Hall – making his feature debut in both roles – seems to realize. The proof is in the pudding, they say, and here it’s the fact that Hall has positioned Cole Baird (Ben Winchell) as the apparent protagonist of a movie that does not really need him to play such an active role. As written and performed, he is an inconsistent character – in flux for the nearly two decades of story here, following Cole from the weeks before graduation from high school until he’s in his late thirties, wondering where it all went wrong – and a mostly reactive presence, as things sort of just happen to him and cause some readjustment of his world view.
In a certain way, this does mean that Hall follows the basic rule of building a character. Cole does, indeed, have an arc – and one of considerable scope – but it takes a significant degree of manipulation to get us there. Right from the start, the film establishes a combative and stressful relationship between Cole and his father John (Jay O. Sanders). Cole wants to be a farmer, having lived all his life in a rural town where few other options exist; John would rather his son spend his college years searching for those options, particularly wherever takes him out of small-town America. Cole’s mother Teresa (Jill Hennessy) is mostly here to provide the first real complication for her son when she announces that she has been sick for some time (one guess as to where that story thread goes).
Actually, the film doesn’t even start with Cole’s family life. Instead, Hall flashes forward a dozen years or so to give us a cryptic warning about what is to come: A phone call interrupts a weekly work meeting in which Cole is in attendance. Whatever he hears on the other end upsets him tremendously, and because this is an example of the movie playing with our emotions, more than an hour lapses before we circle back around to that phone call to receive more context. Between the two times we see the call, the movie gives us half a dozen possibilities for what could have prompted it and what could be so upsetting. His mother’s failing health? Perhaps something that happened to his father?
By then, Cole must be married, right? Indeed, he is – to the pretty and ambitious Sarah (Alisa Allapach), whom he meets years earlier at Georgetown University Law School, an institution he never really saw himself attending earlier in life. Instead, he was an aspiring farmer alongside Jack (Will Brittain), his best friend from childhood, and all that he was doing went to his original vision of his future with then-girlfriend Elle (Aimee Teegarden). Plans changed, of course, as they always do, though Cole never quite imagined that his girlfriend and his best friend might spark a romance while he was away securing that future.
Time passes. Jack and Elle fall into disrepair and destitution; Cole and Sarah continue to rise in their professions, potentially at the cost of their relationship. Most of this is relatively familiar, but the supporting cast (particularly Brittain and Teegarden, who should have been the stars of the movie) nearly elevates the tired material beyond the series of grand, melodramatic gestures of the final act. The Road to Galena leads inevitably to a romantic reunion, revealing that all of this was manipulation to get to a happy ending – if only a gutting tragedy hadn’t gotten in the way of the warm-and-fuzzies.
Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment
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