Wildflower Movie Review

This beautiful indie first turned up on the Lifetime Cable Network. The story, set in the South during the Great Depression, focuses on Reese Witherspoon, then 15, as motherless Ellie Perkins, who lives with her grandmother Bessie (Collin Wilcox Paxton), alcoholic father Jack (Beau Bridges), and teen brother Sammy (William McNamara, then 26). In spite of her own less-than-ideal situation, Ellie discovers 17-year-old Alice Guthrie (the superb Patricia Arquette, then 23), and determines to save the epileptic, partly deaf girl from her cruel stepfather. (Believing that Alice is “possessed,” he has shut her away like an animal.) Sara Flanigan adapted the script from her novel Alice, and director Diane Keaton gives this sad and deeply moving story a wonderfully lyrical look. Note the excellent performances of Witherspoon and Arquette several years before they made their mark as true indie divas.

1991 94m/C Patricia Arquette, Beau Bridges, Susan Blakely, William McNamara, Reese Witherspoon, Collin Wilcox Paxton, Norman (Max) Maxwell, Heather Lynch, Allison Smith, Richard Olsen, Mary Page; D: Diane Keaton; W: Sara Flanigan; C: Janusz Kaminski; M: Jon Gilutin, Ken Edwards. VHS, Closed Caption