Rambling Rose

Actress Diane Ladd died late last year, and TCM did the requisite prime-time tribute to her. One of the movies that they ran was Ladd's Oscar-nominated performance in Rambling Rose. Not having seen the movie before, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

The movie opens up in 1971, as an adult Buddy Hillyer (John Heard) is driving to his old home town of Glennville, GA, to visit his father (Robert Duvall) who sent him a message asking him to come visit with the implication that there was something important to talk about. As he approaches the old homestead, Buddy starts thinking back to when he was a kid, smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression....

So we flash back to 1935. Young Buddy's mom (Diane Ladd) is a woman who apparently inherited some money that the family seems to be living off of, at least in part, because Mom is the sort of woman who was able to attend Barnard (the co-ordinate women's college to Columbia back in the days before official co-education) and is working on a master's thesis in American history. The family also still has the resources to bring in Rose (Laura Dern), a young woman who had a difficult past, to work as the family's maid in exchange for room and board.

Staying with the Hillyers is a way for Rose to escape that past which is implied to be something similar to what Barbara Stanwyck had in Baby Face before heading to New York and sleeping her way to the top. Rose didn't have the wherewithal to get to New York, so instead she's stuck in small town Georgia but still with a large sexual appetite. She kinda-sorta tries to put moves on Dad, which is a bit of an issue, before turning to adolescent Buddy (Lukas Haas) to give him his first sexual experience. But of course all of this presents a bit of a problem for the Hillyers since Dad really ouht to be faithful to Mom, while Buddy is too young to be having sex.

Rose is young and nubile, which makes it natural that she's going to catch the eye of a lot of men in town as well. This causes more problems both in town and at the Hillyer house, especially after one of the men who's interested in Rose is caught in bed with her in the Hillyer house. It might be a bad enough thing if she were spending the night with the guy in town, but bringing him to the house? That's just unconscionable.

So Dad looks for someone else he can fob Rose off on, thankfully having a cousin who will fit the bill. Except that the cousin runs a dairy farm, and Rose has claimed her backstory involves an exceedingly rough childhood on a farm. And if that's not enough, Rose now claims she can't move away anyhow. Nobody will have her since she's pregnant, not having had a period in three months.

Rambling Rose goes on like this, with some pretty good performances, but a story that rather meanders and doesn't really go anywhere until just before the end where the script feels entirely too rushed and has to wrap up a whole bunch of loose ends in the last 10 minutes or so. I certainly didn't hate Rambling Rose, but I didn't quite love it, either.