Tonight I watched "A Slipping-Down Life", Toni Kalem's film based on Anne Tyler's 1970 novel by the same name. It was originally released at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, but just released commercially in May 2004. I saw this with a friend on the spur of the moment, not knowing anything about it, when the film we went to see was sold out.<br /><br />The film takes place in a sleepy small town in North Carolina around 1962 or 1963 (based on the music we hear on the radio). Naive Evie (Lili Taylor), who lost her mother at childbirth, lives with her father (Tom Bower). She hears musician Drumstring "Drum" Casey (Guy Pearce) on the radio, is drawn to his ego and voice, and seeks him out at his performances. Other women flirt with Drum, but shy Evie can only take a quick photograph of him and then in a strange (and, I found, hard to believe) act, carve his last name on her forehead with broken glass. The story is of their relationship to each other and to life in their small town, where they fear nothing changes and their existence or non-existence is hardly noticed.<br /><br />I didn't enjoy the film. I couldn't understand where it was going, and found the utter simplicity of Evie unrealistic. I found Drum to be rather wooden and two-dimensional as in fact I found many of the characters. The only characters commanding any admiration were the gentle father who seemed to indulge Evie, their gutsy housekeeper, Clotelia (Irma P. Hall), who told it like it was (reminding me just a bit of Dilsey in William Faulker's novel, "The Sound and the Fury"), and Evie's loyal friend, hairdresser Violet (Sara Rue).<br /><br />I wondered about the raucous music of Drum's band, which seemed to me at least a 15-year anachronism in the early 1960s. I didn't find the editing to make a dull, uninspiring, and "so what" story anything but even more dull. Of course, my comments could be attributed to my unfamiliarity with Anne Tyler's novels or lack of attention to slow, sleepy, small-town southern culture (though I enjoyed the 1989 film, "Steel Magnolias").<br /><br /> --Dilip June 15, 2004