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Disappearances

Peacocks, prognostication, potatoes

By NINA MACLAUGHLIN | January 31, 2007

3.0 Stars

Kris Kristofferson

The misty fields and forests and the rolling hills and twisting creeks of Kingdom County in Vermont prove to be as much a character as Kris Kristofferson’s feisty, headstrong Quebec Bill in the third installment of Jay Craven’s trilogy based on novels by Howard Frank Moser. It’s Prohibition, and Bill and his teenage son Wild Bill (the skeptical, pink-cheeked, decidedly unwild Charlie McDermott) make a whiskey-smuggling run across the border into Canada. The film becomes increasingly illusory as their odyssey progresses: characters vanish into the woods, a snowy owl foretells of death, and a certain ageless villain won’t stay dead. Craven blends the fantastical — peacocks, prognostication — with stark Depression-era reality — potatoes, hay — as he examines the challenges of living within and at odds with nature. The most vital subtext, though, involves what’s inherited — the curses and the strengths — and what’s lost between father and son.

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