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'Off the Map': A quirky, refreshing journey

As far as mainstream Hollywood is concerned, a delicate, funny, character-driven movie like "Off the Map" is, well, off the map. It simply doesn't exist in the same universe as vast opening weekends and fast-food tie-ins.

Hollywood's loss. Ours, too.

Holedigger Studios 'Off the Map' B The verdict: Worth finding. Director: Campbell Scott Starring: Amy Brenneman, Valentina de Angelis, Joan Allen, Sam Elliott, Jim True-Frost Run time: 105 minutes Release date: April 22, 2005 Rating: PG-13 for nudity and thematic elements. On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "Off the Map"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Based on Joan Ackermann's play, the movie is set in 1974 in a lone-prairie corner of New Mexico where the Groden family lives a hippie-ish existence amid a John Ford landscape. Arlene (Joan Allen) is a resourceful earth-mother type who gardens in the nude, can cure allergies with herbs and knows how to get the smell of a skunk off the family dog. In other words, she is all-powerful.

Except when it comes to healing the sudden and very deep depression her husband, Charley (Sam Elliott), has sunk into, whereby he mostly sits staring into space, tears trickling down his cheeks. "I'm a damn crying machine," he says in one of his few efforts to communicate.

Their 11-year-old daughter, Bo (gifted newcomer Valentina de Angelis) desperately wants all the material things her parents have so strenuously rejected. (They don't even go in for electricity and running water.) She craves Kmart and her own credit card. She's also a master at writing companies about their "defective" products and receiving a free case of their stuff as an apology.

Into this oddball Eden strides William Gibbs ("The Wire's" Jim True-Frost), an IRS agent in a suit and tie, in search of the Grodens' past seven years of tax returns. Bo briefly hopes he will be her conduit to the outside world. But no such luck. Their world swallows him. Before long, he's taken up painting and is declaring his undying love for Arlene, who looks up from her in-the-buff pruning and says, "Well, good."

Though it sometimes betrays its stage origins, "Off the Map" easily accommodates the ironic whimsy and softer aura of an earlier decade. Director Campbell Scott ("Big Night") doesn't hurry the movie along. He purposely lets it dawdle, so as to showcase the literate script and the superlative performances.

Quiet and quirky, yet refreshingly unpretentious, "Off the Map" is a welcome sojourn in a place that seems strange, yet entirely familiar. It's imbued with a sense of acceptance and getting on with it that's wonderfully generous and thoroughly American.