`Rain Without Thunder,” a movie exploring reproductive freedom, defines its own title, taken from a Frederick Douglass speech: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet avoid confrontation . . . want rain without thunder.”
This movie is rain without thunder, not to mention drama without tension, acting without reacting, and thought without passion. It is entirely talking heads, if nothing else a provocative test of the medium’s preference for action.
Meticulously written and directed by Gary Bennett, who once-tellingly- practiced law, “Rain” takes the form of a gentle inquisition conducted by a TV reporter into the “Goldring case,” the jailing of a mother and her daughter for having flown to Sweden to obtain the daughter’s abortion. The year is 2042, U.S. abortions have been outlawed by constitutional amendment, and an ambitious prosecutor is using the Goldring case to test a pet piece of legislation, “The Unborn Child Kidnapping Act.”
The best that can be said for the film’s low-key approach is that the matter-of-fact tone bolsters its believability. That granted, the characters’ endless drone of analysis-however well-reasoned-is about as gripping as the annual report of a major lending institution. “Rain” reeks of control on both sides of the camera. What it desperately needs is a healthy dose of anarchy.
Most sci-fi directors steep their movies in a look of post-apocalyptic trash. Bennett has taken the opposite tack, dressing “Rain Without Thunder” in a production design which argues that the 21st Century may cost us our freedoms but gain us universal good taste.
He has peppered the script with enough inventive 21st Century “slang” terms (a woman is not impregnated; she is “fruited”) to bring us occasionally out of the doldrums of rhetoric. And he has attracted an impressive cast, including a beefy Jeff Daniels as the Goldrings’ philosophical defense attorney, Frederic Forrest as the prison’s faintly weirdo warden, Linda Hunt as an articulate feminist and Graham Greene as a dismissive academic.
Each manages to suggest, in the small window that is his time on camera, an interesting life “offstage.” Would we could see it.
“Rain Without Thunder”
(STAR) 1/2
Written and directed by Gary Bennett; photographed by Karl Kases; production designed by Ina Mayhew; music composed and performed by Randall and Allen Lynch; costumes designed by Gail Bartley; edited by Mallory Gottlieb and Suzanne Pillsbury; produced by Nanette Sorensen and Gary Sorensen. An Orion Classics release at the Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:25. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Reporter . . . . . . . . . Carolyn McCormick
Allison Goldring . . . . . Ali Thomas
Beverly Goldring . . . . . Betty Buckley
Andrea Murdoch . . . . . . Iona Morris
Jonathan Garson . . . . . . Jeff Daniels
Warden . . . . . . . . . . Frederic Forrest
Atwood Society Director . . Linda Hunt
Author on History . . . . . Graham Greene
Catholic Priest . . . . . . Austin Pendleton
Old Lawyer . . . . . . . . Robert Earl Jones
