1922: The Family Plot

Ghosts  in stories are often the consequence of some kind of tragedy or injustice - they exist because a wrong has not been righted, and they are tied to our world until it is, whether that’s by giving the spirit justice or exacting revenge. Usually, the story is about the ghost itself and how some outsider stumbled upon their existence and tries to set them right, usually discovering whatever injustice was done to them in the process.

1922 is a somber, measured story of damnation, ruin, and regret that cuts out the middleman, and tells us the ghost’s whole sad story, no outside intervention necessary.

It’s…well, it’s 1922, and the James family - Wilfrid, Arlette, and their son Henry - live on a farm in Hemingford Home, Nebraska. It’s a working farm, Wilfrid raises corn and cattle, and like any farm, they have their flush periods and their lean periods, depending on how good the crop is. But they’ve got land, and they’ve got their home, and even a Model T that Wilfrid is starting to let Henry drive around town. Which will come in handy, since Henry’s sweet on the neighbor girl, Shannon Cotterie. Idyllic enough, but for the strain around the edges. Wilfrid’s got a stubborn streak when it comes to his land, one that gets exercised at the thought of a large hog-farming concern that’s coming in and buying up as much land as they can. Arlette’s not from the country, and she never really has become accustomed to farm life. When she’s had a few too many, she becomes bitter and crude, resentful at how a youthful indiscretion saddled her with a husband and a son and life she never wanted.

The James family could have carried on like this for some time, until Arlette receives news that she’s inherited 100 acres of land from her late father. To Wilfrid, this means expanding the farm, a chance at something more than just getting by. This means turning into a larger operation, a shot at prosperity. But to Arlette, the land - or rather, its sale to the large hog farming concern - means a ticket out of Hemingford Home, back to a life in the city. Given how strained things are, naturally the talk between Wilfrid and Arlette soon turns to divorce, and Arlette’s firm conviction that she’s going to take the land and Henry and get as far away as she can.

And so Wilfrid decides that Arlette will have to die.

This is all set up pretty economically in the first act of the film, and neither party is really wholly sympathetic here, though Arlette certainly gets the shorter end of the stick. She resists any negotiation or compromise, and feels utterly entitled to things going entirely her way. Wilfrid sees everything he cares about - land and family - slipping away from him, but admits in voiceover that every man contains within him another version of himself - a conniving man, prone to the wrong thing. Wilfrid gives into the conniving man, and not only plots to kill Arlette, but also begins to convince Henry that this is the only choice they have.

The first act, then, feels a little bit like something from a Jim Thompson novel as we bear witness to the machinations of a man who knows what he’s doing is wrong, but is just selfish enough to find ways to justify it. As he moves closer and closer to killing Arlette, the film feels increasingly claustrophobic, as these two people who mean each other ill continue to share a house and a bed.

When Arlette’s death comes, it is messy and chaotic. It is an ugly and inelegant death, the work of someone unprepared for the reality of what he’s committed to doing.  The disposal of her body ends up being more difficult than anyone anticipated, and then there’s the problem of how to explain her absence. But this isn’t so much a story about whether or not Henry (who helped hold her down while his father cut his mother’s throat) and Wilfrid are going to get caught by the law, it’s about everything that happens afterward.

The film begins with Wilfrid, bearded and much the worse for wear, checking into a hotel, giving an unusual amount of consideration to whether or not he can hear anything in the walls of his room. He sits down to write out what is essentially a confession, the tale that makes up the rest of the film, and he talks a lot about damnation. And so that is the business of the second and third acts of the film, chronicling how this most selfish and cruel of acts destroys everything Wilfrid has. Wilfrid and Henry’s relationship begins to disintegrate under the weight of what they’ve done, under the steadily mounting realization that Wilfrid’s stubbornness is only making their life harder. Moreover, Wilfrid’s ceded any moral high ground he could use to counsel his son and keep him in line. Why should Henry listen to his father? Who is he, a murderer, to tell Henry what he can and cannot do?

And then the rats come. The rats that found Arlette’s body so quickly, the rats that find their way into everything.

Wilfrid and Henry drift apart, and so Henry makes a bad decision of his own, and in the third act, Wilfrid’s damnation sealed, his land cursed, everything he ever had or wanted slips away from him anyway. Death chases down anything and anyone he ever cared about, heralded by shadowy visions of Arlette and waves of rats. It’s equal measures unsettling and heartbreaking, an awful, lonely decline attended by visions of the dead past and yet to come. Wilfrid faces a reckoning in the end, and if you did spot a pale, disfigured woman by an old well in Hemingford Home today, it wouldn’t be because she’d gone unavenged.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix