Local Hero: Our Man in Ferness

These environmental images and ideas are typical of the seriousness that runs through Forsyth’s comedy across all of the eight features he has made to date. In his superb 1987 adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping, for example, central characters abandon the comforts of “civilized” domesticity for immersion in nature and an itinerant life. Echoing Local Hero’s tonal complexity, Housekeeping refuses to portray its protagonists’ decision as either straightforwardly perverse or straightforwardly principled, throwing such judgments back to the audience instead. Several of Local Hero’s other themes make equally sophisticated contributions to Forsyth’s distinctive form of humor, and also regularly reappear across his oeuvre. One such preoccupation involves the profound material and emotional difficulties that people encounter when searching for a home (whether as a physical place or a psychological state). Since Forsyth first explored this idea in Local Hero, every one of his subsequent movies has also featured protagonists who either struggle to achieve or (as in Housekeeping) deliberately reject the comforting myth of domesticity as a fixed point of geographical or psychological residence. Local Hero’s immediate follow-up, Comfort and Joy (1984), for instance, follows the travails of a Glasgow disc jockey whose romantic disappointments make him feel utterly alone within the local community whose sense of identity his daily broadcasts help sustain.

Local Hero’s particular take on the elusiveness of home represents perhaps the most unsparingly sober of all the film’s ingenious ironies and jokes. The story’s arc seems to offer Mac the possibility of just such a haven before belatedly denying his arrival there. Running jokes are a signature element of Forsyth’s comic approach; the respective scales of the beauty dangled before Mac and the misery of its eventual loss are communicated through one such chain of gags. Telephones abound within scenes set in his hometown of Houston, whereas he finds that Ferness functions with a single public phone box. In Houston, technology erodes community: people can easily speak across any distance, but their conversations usually alienate them from one another. In Ferness, the physical nature of most dealings appears to bring people closer together. Little wonder, then, that Mac aches to swap the States for Scotland, or that we as viewers root for him in this regard too. Ultimately, however, Local Hero’s exquisitely open-ended conclusion sees Mac and most of the film’s Scottish characters seemingly stranded in places that they still don’t want to call home. Mac is forced to quit Ferness, while the villagers’ desire to sell up is thwarted when the Knox petrochemical-plant plan falls through. In this way, one of the funniest films of the eighties also ends up being one of the most thought-provoking.

An unhelpful attitude about Forsyth involves the patronizing critical notion that his films, while they have delighted many, are constrained by their obvious and sympathetic interest in the quirks of human identity and activity. A Bill Forsyth film, the argument goes, struggles to wrench its creative energies away from the small-scale (albeit charming) act­ions of harmless Walter Mitty types. The compliments routinely offered Forsyth’s films are often double-edged for this reason. “Gentle,” “wry,” “quirky,” “quaint,” “whimsical”—this is the rhetoric of (undeserved) diminution. Forsyth, to quote Jonathan Rosenbaum, all too often ends up dismissed as “a lowercase filmmaker” within histories of late-twentieth-century cinema.

Forsyth has been aware of this dilemma since his career’s earliest stages. At the time of Local Hero’s release, he said, “I feel insistently misunderstood . . . All the films I’ve made, I’ve always had a much darker side than most people have perceived.” It’s easy to see how such a superficial misreading might play out in the case of Local Hero. Its comic ensemble could be neatly pigeonholed as baffled (Mac), barmy (Happer), and bucolic (the folk of Ferness). But when the central characters of Forsyth’s cinema are properly considered, a far more complex picture emerges. Local Hero’s entire plot, for example, arises from and is resolved by the aspirations and actions of a protagonist (Happer) who suspects, but fails to fully understand, the compromised nature of his mental health. A similar structural premise shapes the plots and themes of both Comfort and Joy and Housekeeping. Unemployed Glasgow teenager Ronnie (Robert Buchanan), the lead character of Forsyth’s debut feature, That Sinking Feeling (1979), contemplates suicide. The congenital naivete of Gregory Underwood (John Gordon Sinclair) becomes much less benign when Forsyth’s final film to date, Gregory’s Two Girls (1999), revisits the eternal youth of Gregory’s Girl (1980). Breaking In (1989) is a subtly wrought portrait of an aging career criminal (Burt Reynolds) whose professional mastery is predicated on personal masochism. The five protagonists (each played by Robin Williams) of Being Human (1994) are all traumatized by long-term separation from partners and/or children. Granted, Forsyth’s treatment of such people and the situations they find themselves in is nonjudgmental and often outright funny. But it is also remarkably unsparing and clear-eyed, a hallmark of the subtlety and originality that characterize all of this filmmaker’s cinema.

For all the reasons above, Local Hero should be seen as a seminal late-twentieth-century film and its creator as a seminal late-twentieth-century filmmaker. But Forsyth must also be celebrated for the remarkable scale of his importance for filmmaking in his native country. It was not simply that the critical success of his first three features—That Sinking Feeling, the worldwide breakout hit Gregory’s Girl, and Local Hero—announced the arrival of an internationally significant new British filmmaking talent. It was also that, with the possible (and at best only partial) exception of Bill Douglas’s Childhood Trilogy (1972–78), Forsyth’s trio of features represented the first time a Scottish filmmaker had successfully managed to produce fiction features working from a Scottish base and with significant elements of Scottish cultural content, creative talent, and funding input.

By the time of Local Hero’s release, then, the weight of local cinematic expectation and aspiration on Forsyth’s shoulders was an extraordinarily heavy one. In significant part, this was because the historical absence of an indigenous Scottish cinema had not meant a historical absence of cinematic images of Scotland. To many local minds, the inesca­pable problem with the latter was that they had been produced within other film industries, mainly the metropolitan British one and Hollywood. Depictions of Scotland had thus been flagrantly romantic and unrealistic. The contemporary hope was that an emergent wave of natively based filmmaking talent, spearheaded by Forsyth, would produce a genuine national cinema that would correct and compensate for decades of cultural misrepresentation.