by Tina Kakadelis, Staff Writer

To say my mom hates movies would be a truth and a lie all rolled into one. The truth of that statement is that if she never went to another movie theatre again for the rest of her life, she would be perfectly okay with that. The lie of it is that she would be devastated if she lost the “so-bad-they’re-good” genre of movie. All other films, though - drama, comedy, biopic, sci-fi, what have you - can get lost. In a sense, recommending a movie to my mom is perhaps nearly impossible for someone like me. A two-and-a-half-hour movie where French women stare at each other longingly while one secretly paints the other? Sign me up and I’ll tell everyone I know that they have to see it. My mom? That movie’s getting turned off in the first ten minutes. Never mind that it’s widely regarded as one of the best films of the 21st century. It’s no Sharknado (the original).

The kind of movie my mom likes has to be able to be understood without her giving it her full attention. Movies like The Princess Switch, Crawl, and any generic Christmas movie are what she chooses to watch. Genetically, I find this difficult to understand, when I’ve been averaging a movie a day for the past three years. I’ve gotten better at knowing what my mom wants out of a movie. It’s why I gambled and showed her Orphan: First Kill (she loved it). She either wants off-the-wall insanity, the once-every two-years fluff piece, or movies that are perfectly historically accurate. There is nothing else for her.

Despite her feelings about movies, my mom reads every single review and essay I write about films. She has no idea who Mike Mills is, nor does she care about his tender style of filmmaking, but she knows his name the same way she knew all the names of the Jonas Brothers when I was obsessed with them in middle school.

I’m not sure if it’s an afternoon my mom remembers, but just after I graduated from college, I moved in with my parents. I was having a really tough time adjusting to my new life, and I was in a low spot with my mental health. One May afternoon, she asked if I wanted to see a movie, just the two of us. I picked Money Monster because I thought maybe she’d like it too, but I don’t think she did. It was a very sweet, simple gesture, one that she repeated in December 2019 with Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, when I was at another low point. I don’t know if these outings stick out in her brain like they do in mine. Life is overwhelming and difficult. Sometimes it’s hard to stay afloat, and I was drowning in both of those instances, but she, and cinema, helped me catch my breath.

Perhaps the most antithetical fact about my mom’s movie watching habits is that she loves Local Hero. The film celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year. It’s a fish-out-of-water story about Mac (Peter Riegert), an oil executive in Houston, Texas, who is sent to rural Scotland to purchase a village so the land can be turned into a refinery. Along the way, he bonds with the eccentric villagers and comes to enjoy their relaxed lifestyle. The film is more dramedy than outright comedy, but my mom talks about it like it’s a joke-a-minute movie.

She may think of Local Hero like this because she first saw it in 1986 with two of her closest friends. I asked her how they came across the television broadcast, but she wasn’t sure. It was probably just on, they were drinking, and the rest is history. Despite having only seen Local Hero that one time (until after I was born), my mom and her friends regularly quote from it to each other. Their favorite line is “Gordon, I’m dying.” It makes me wonder if this abnormality in her relationship with movies had anything to do with Local Hero at all.

Prior to writing this, I tried to track down a copy of Local Hero to watch with my mom. We tried renting it on Amazon, but the TV had an issue with playback. I requested it from the library, but somebody else must want to celebrate the fortieth anniversary because my request is still pending. This would have only been her third time seeing the film. The first was the aforementioned viewing with her friends, and the second was sometime around the end of my elementary school/beginning of middle school. That viewing was particularly traumatic for me because I loved bunnies at that time and there’s a bunny in Local Hero that does not have a happy ending. However, when I asked, my mom remembered nothing about that viewing except her favorite line and my sadness about the bunny. Her memory of plot points is hazy and she can’t really articulate why her love for Local Hero has endured the way it has.

In some ways, it feels poetic that all of our efforts to track down a copy of Local Hero were thwarted, because it calls attention to the fact that it might never have been about the movie to begin with. Maybe my mom’s love for Local Hero has both everything and nothing to do with the film itself. Maybe, instead, it’s about the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of art. There's no rhyme or reason to why people cling to different films or songs or paintings, it’s a matter of right place, right mindset, right time. Had the first time my mom watched Local Hero been when she was alone, I might not be sitting here writing about it at all. There’s magic in the connection that can only come from experiencing something for the first time with people we care about. It can’t be duplicated or manufactured. The stars simply aligned for my mom and her friends to be huddled together in her Boston apartment, drinking boxed wine and enjoying each other’s company, while Local Hero played commanded all of their attention. If my mom ever revisits Local Hero and it doesn’t have an ounce of its original shine, she’ll always have “Gordon, I’m dying.”