Balloon Farm

Steven Karczynski has one IMDb credit that is not in Development Hell. If the rest of them are of similar quality as the one that made it out, I understand completely. It’s not good. Now, not all of that can be put at Karczynski’s feet; he didn’t direct, cast, or write the music for it. There’s a lot of blame to go around, here, though we’ll get to one or two small kernels of “this didn’t totally suck,” but it starts from a script that both isn’t good and has extremely little to do with the charming children’s book in theory being adapted for this. It’s also not his fault that I started my morning with Michael Eisner; that’s blame Michael Eisner and I must share.

Watertown is a small farming community in probably rural California given this is Disney. There is a drought to the extent that all water is being rationed, though we see several locals violating that rationing. (I have the most sympathy for the woman who is simply making iced tea, though she needs to learn about the dangers of making sun tea.) The Johnson farm is coming up on its centennial; Casey (Laurie Metcalf) is excited about her family heritage, but her husband, Jake (Fredric Lane) is more concerned about making ends meet. And then one day, Harvey Potter (Rip Torn) arrives, renting a farm at the worst possible time.

I already hated this movie before Rip Torn showed up, because things we’ll get to in a minute, but Rip Torn is badly miscast here. It’s hard to take him seriously as a whimsical Mysterious Stranger who, within moments of his appearance, gets the local sheriff (Neal McDonough) to not impound his unregistered truck despite his lack of a license by producing a magic, steaming hot pecan pie. Potter then sorts through seed corn, picking out individual kernels, and plants them on his farm without irrigating them. Overnight, they sprout balloons, because Willow Johnson (Mara Wilson) and her friends had thrown a water balloon at local curmudgeon Weasel Mayfield (Roberts Blossom).

Now, you’re not psychic if you figure out that the climax of the movie will involve using balloons somehow to end the town’s drought. If it didn’t go quite the way I was expecting, well, the details only vaguely matter. There are enormous numbers of boxes that get ticked not because that’s an organic way for the story to proceed but because the boxes have to get ticked in this kind of story. The idea that maybe they don’t is apparently a foreign one to Karczynski. Everyone has to turn against Potter because you need that twist in the second act to lead to their trusting him again in the third. That’s just how this story goes.

Lord help him, Rip Torn is trying. So are Mara Wilson and Laurie Metcalf. Maybe even Fredric Lane. And Adam Wylie got an award nomination from an organization I’ve never heard of for playing Willow’s friend Charles. Similarly, RuDee Sade has a fun minor role as Willow’s other friend, who is obsessed with aliens. On the other hand, Neil McDonough has clearly been given the instruction, as have most of the rest of the cast, that he needs to play the role as broad as possible. He even, if you know this reference, pronounces “water” in the same way Kent Hovind did at one point.

The balloon design isn’t terrible; they do manage to make it look as though these are balloons that have grown. It’s a combination between careful filming and interesting design of the “stem.” And I mean, if you film from far enough away, yeah, you can make it look like balloons are growing. And this is where we’re running out of positive things for me to say, because Lord this movie isn’t good.

The first thing I hated was the music. I watched this in a version someone taped off The Wonderful World of Disney, and it includes all the original commercials. (Oh, hi, Patrick Warburton and Diedrich Bader interacting with the all-new Crispy M&M!) And there’s a Toyota commercial that feels as though it was scored by the same person. It’s frankly shocking that Richard Marvin would go on to compose the music for Six Feet Under two years later, because hoo boy is this one not on that level. It’s very “I have five minutes and a Casio.”

Okay, this is made-for-TV. It’s not going to have the same budget as The Sixth Sense, also technically a Disney release (though one of those Disney releases I don’t consider eligible for the column because it was Hollywood Pictures). It may not even have the budget of The Straight Story. A big budget does not a quality film make (you will note I’m not covering Inspector Gadget this month, either), but at least it could’ve fixed some of what was wrong with this. Getting a different screenwriter and making the composer do better would’ve been even better. Director William Dear has probably done better, too; he directed an early Michael Nesmith video, not to mention Harry and the Hendersons and the first episode of Dinosaurs. So many of these people are wasted on this. It’s not the best use of my time, either.