In James Lee Burke’s short story Winter Light, a mixture of grief and belief sets a retired professor crosswise with his surroundings and his neighbors, with disastrous consequences.
Hanover native Julian Higgins turned the story into a 2015 short film of the same title and thought he was done with it.
But stories have a way of coming around again, and the 2016 election brought Burke’s tale of fractured communication and clashing worldviews back to Higgins’ mind.
“The themes of it seemed relevant in a new way,” Higgins said in a Wednesday phone interview. He called the story “a confrontation between a person’s value system and belief system and a world that doesn’t seem to care.”
He did what artists do the world over: “I decided to trust my instincts and see where that led.”
The result is God’s Country, which opens around the U.S., and at Hanover’s Nugget Theaters, on Friday. Higgins’ first feature, which he directed, co-wrote and co-produced, was made as a small, independent film. But thanks to its mix of lyricism, realism and topicality, and an extraordinary performance by Thandiwe Newton, it set off a bidding war and was picked up by IFC Films after it screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
In his second interpretation of Winter Light, Higgins made some substantial changes. He and co-writer Shaye Ogbonna recast the main character, turning a 58-year-old white man into a 40-something Black woman. Newton plays Sandra Guidry, a professor at a rural western university. (The film was shot in Montana.) Her mother has just died, and soon after Guidry finds a red pickup parked on her remote property. She asks the two hunters who return to it to leave, setting up a conflict that grinds along through the rest of the film.
I watched the film Tuesday night, but I’m not reviewing it here. I’ll say this about it: Despite its beauty and how well-crafted it is, God’s Country was a hard film to watch.
In a way, that’s by design. Higgins and Ogbonna worked on the script together in 2017, and while they started from the perspective of people who wanted to dramatize America’s fraught relationships with race, the resulting film resists any simple and straightforward reading.
Part of that complexity stems from the amount of time Higgins and Ogbonna had to work on the script. They started filming in late February 2020 and shut down after three weeks, sending everyone home before the coronavirus pandemic completely closed off transportation.
“We made a bunch of changes that I think made the movie stronger,” Higgins said. The May 2020 killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis set off a new round of national soul-searching about race, and the screenwriters kept close watch. “Throughout the whole process, Shaye and I were trying to incorporate what we were seeing into the script.”
Depending on how widely it’s seen, God’s Country could plunge into the troubled waters of American discourse like a heavy, flat rock. It doesn’t take much to imagine a political crank turning the film’s carefully wrought characters into types that can be thrown around in our seemingly inexhaustible culture wars.
Such a possibility is less concerning to Higgins now than it was while he and Ogbonna were shaping the script.
“Shaye and I are very aware of the politicized landscape of this country,” he said. “But we wanted to make a film that would not be easily dismissed.”
While the film embodies the national tensions, it does so without many of what Higgins called “indicators” that would call the political backdrop to mind.
“Our idea was to try to deny those indicators and make it harder to watch,” he said.
This is what art is for: to show us life, not political posturing.
“The instinct to make the movie was certainly coming from a place where we needed to be actively engaged in a situation that was alarming,” Higgins said. But with the finished work, “our goal was to express the dynamics of what we’ve been seeing.”
Casting Newton was critical to the film’s success, Higgins said. Though he’d already secured financing, he felt the film could not be made without her. He spent two weeks crafting a one-page letter to the English actor and sent it to her agent along with the script.
“My hunch was correct that she would respond to it and want to do it,” Higgins said.
She also became “a true partner in the process,” he said, leading the way on the set. Newton’s performance should make her a candidate for major awards, he said.
Higgins is now at work on a new script, a survival film that, like God’s Country, is focused on a character’s interior life amid sweeping scenery.
He credited his Hanover upbringing with launching him into a career as an artist. In addition to being professors, his parents are both cinephiles. His mother, Lynn, who teaches at Dartmouth, favors the character-driven films of post-war French cinema; his father, Roland, a professor at Keene State College, prefers movies on the epic scale. Director Akira Kurosawa is a favorite. Higgins’ tastes and interests, not surprisingly, combine the two.
More importantly, people in Hanover encouraged him to go into the arts, not a common line of conversation between adults and teens.
“It matters so much when you’re a young person and you’re passionate about an art form … to have people around you who say, ‘You’re doing great. Keep going.’ ” Higgins said.
A fellow Hanover High graduate, Anthony Ciardelli, served as executive producer on God’s Country. Higgins has known him since middle school, and they wrote for the high school newspaper together.
“Anthony single-handedly made this movie possible,” Higgins said. “He was one of the first people to read the script, he was our first producing partner, he was our first investor and he has seen the film through all the way to the end, from financing to production to the release.”
Despite the changes to his original story, Burke has supported the film adaptation and wrote glowingly in support of it after Higgins arranged a screening in Missoula, Mont. He said in a statement on his website that he and others in the audience were “stunned,” and Higgins said he’s seen that kind of quiet reflection in other audiences that have seen God’s Country.
“People appreciate that the movie trusts the audience,” Higgins said.
Whether Americans can learn to trust each other is another matter.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
