Digging to China movie storyline. Set in the mid-1960s, the story centers on ten-year-old Harriet Frankovitz, a lonely outcast who lives with her mother and older sister Gwen in the dilapidated motel with cabins shaped like teepees her mother received as part of her divorce settlement.
Harriet has a strong desire to escape her dull existence by means of any one of a number of creative ways – a magic carpet she tries to fly off the roof, on board a flying saucer she anxiously awaits in the schoolyard, through a tunnel she has been digging to China, or by attaching helium-filled balloons to a lawn chair.
Mrs. Frankovitz is a bitter alcoholic with a propensity for driving on the wrong side of the road, while promiscuous Gwen entertains a series of men in vacant rooms. Terminally ill Leah Schroth is en route to an institution where she plans to admit her mentally challenged son Ricky when their car breaks down near the motel, and the two stay there while waiting for the vehicle to be repaired. Mrs. Frankovitz is killed in an automobile accident, and Harriet discovers Gwen is her biological mother.
Digging to China is a 1998 American drama film that marked the directorial debut of actor Timothy Hutton and the screen debut of Evan Rachel Wood. The screenplay by Karen Janszen focuses on the friendship forged between a precocious pre-teenaged girl with a vivid imagination and a mentally challenged adult male.
Film Review for Digging to China
Some awfully familiar buttons are pushed in “Digging to China,” the story of a sweetly eccentric 10-year-old girl’s friendship with a sweetly eccentric 30-year-old man who happens to be mentally disabled. Although there’s nothing intrinsically false about the story of these two lonely misfits forming a deep emotional bond, which the outside world views with suspicion, the movie, directed by the actor Timothy Hutton (in his debut behind the camera) from a screenplay by Karen Janszen, is entirely predictable. The moment these two innocents share their first cuddly embrace you know somebody’s going to get the wrong idea. You also know that sooner or later their idyll will be rudely shattered.
At its best, the movie finds Kevin Bacon stretching his formidable talents to deliver a poignant stunt performance as Ricky Schroth, a twitching, compulsively smiling grown-up with the mind of a child. If Bacon isn’t able to lose himself in his character the way Dustin Hoffman did in “Rain Man,” his portrayal of a shy frightened young man who is just smart enough to know he’s mentally handicapped is touching and believable.
Ricky is being driven to a home for the mentally disabled by his ailing mother, Leah (Marian Seldes), who has been found to have cancer, when their car breaks down somewhere in the rural East. Mother and son are forced to stay in a family-run motel, where Ricky meets Harriet Frankovitz (Evan Rachel Wood), the wildly imaginative girl who becomes his soul mate.
Harriet’s mother (Cathy Moriarty), a bitter, tough-talking alcoholic, runs the motel with the help of her sullen, slatternly 26-year-old daughter, Gwen (Mary Stuart Masterston). When Mrs. Frankovitz gets behind the wheel of a car she tends to weave down the center of the road. In the movie’s only unpredictable moment, she dies in a car accident, leaving Harriet in the care of the older sister, who reveals herself, to the little girl’s horror, to be Harriet’s biological mother.
The movie, set in the late 1960s, strains hard to portray Harriet as an adorably precocious child whose wild imagination is a sign of a her superior intelligence and artistic potential. In the voice-over narration that opens the movie, Harriet confesses her lifelong desire to escape to another world via magic carpet or flying saucer. Once, she recalls, she started digging a hole in the ground hoping to tunnel through the center of the earth directly to China. In one scene, Harriet literally tries to fly away by attaching a bunch of helium balloons to a chair.
Harriet and Ricky’s bond has everything to do with their desire to escape from a hostile, indifferent world. Harriet’s grandiose fantasies have made her a joke among her classmates, who taunt her every day on the bus ride to school. Ricky’s future is grimmer. He knows that he is being dropped off at an institution and that he may soon lose the mother who has loved and protected him. In the most dramatic sequence, the two friends run away together and camp out in the woods in an abandoned caboose.
“Digging to China,” to its credit, doesn’t grab at the heartstrings and strum an aggressively mawkish ballad. In fact, it could do with a bit more heart. Part of the problem is Ms. Wood’s Harriet. The young actress is radiantly photogenic, but her performance is muted and monochromatic. As she confides her fantasies, you never have the sense of the volatile emotional life out of which they are spun. No matter what she says, Ms. Wood’s Harriet sounds sensible and self-contained to the point of blandness. Without an incandescent performance at its center, “Digging to China” follows the same path as Harriet’s balloon escape. It gets stuck in the trees.
Digging to China (1998)
Directed by: Timothy Hutton
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Mary Stuart Masterson, Cathy Moriarty, Evan Rachel Wood, Marian Seldes, Amanda Minikus, Joanne Pankow, Nicole Burdette, Bing Putney
Screenplay by: Karen Janszen
Production Design by: Robert de Vico
Cinematography by: Jörgen Persson
Film Editing by: Dana Congdon, Alain Jakubowicz
Costume Design by: Mary Zophres
Set Decoration by: Joyce Anne Gilstrap
Music by: Cynthia Millar
MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and some emotional moments.
Distributed by: Moonstone Entertainment
Release Date: September 11, 1998
Views: 272
