Loving a ‘Nosey Parker’
Director to attend screening
By DANA DUGAN
Express Staff Writer
At the 2003 Nantucket Film
Festival a teeny little film made in Vermont, by a sheep farmer no less,
won a special jury prize, and at four other film festivals won best
film. The movie, "Nosey Parker," is being screened 7 p.m. Thursday,
April 15, at the Magic Lantern in Ketchum.
Photo by Jack Rowell
It’s the third homemade Vermont
tale in a trilogy of films by Writer, Director, Editor, Producer John
O’Brien. The other two are "Vermont is for Lovers" and "A Man With a
Plan."
O’Brien will be in attendance for
the screening and there will be a question and answer period with him
following.
The best way to describe his
latest movie is to say it’s gorgeously shot on location in the
director’s hometown of Tunbridge. It uses some actual actors and many
real people who actually inhabit the town. It uses a lot of
improvisation, and it’s delightful in a wry and surprising way. It’s
also irresistible.
Here’s the gist: A smug older
husband, who’s a shrink, and his second wife, an ex-patient, move up to
Vermont from the faster paced Tri-state area—New Jersey, New York and
Connecticut. They build a trophy house on a gorgeous piece of land and
settle down.
He’s smug and insensitive. She’s
vulnerable (after all she married her shrink) and lonely. When a trio of
elderly Tax Listers arrive to do some assessing and a bit of snooping,
she invites one of them, George Lyford who portrays a craggy old fellow,
to return. Then she hires him to be their handyman, an idea that seems
incredible until you see George wield a saw.
Retired dairy farmer Lyford was in
his 80s when the movie was made and sadly died soon after. We can only
hope he had a smile on his face, because this non-actor simply melts
your heart along with the heart of the lonely wife. He becomes the
companion and friend her husband can’t be, and introduces her to his
life and the Vermont that lies beyond her manicured lawn.
Wall Street Journal Drama Critic
Donald Lyons wrote in his review of "Nosey Parker" that it
is not some "sugared take on pastoral virtues; we get living
people—cranky, odd, sad, generous—co-creating a cinema in which real
American lives breathe through the pores of the narrative. This quietly
revolutionary moviemaking is never sentimental; there's a sharp,
life-weathered Vermont tang to the life we see."
In an interview with the New York
Times, O’Brien said, "I wanted to capture everything about these old
people before they die, their sense of humor, their accents, their
stories, their sense of community."