THE HIGH COUNTRY (1981) **1/2 Harvey Hart doesn't use his characters like metaphors, but they speak to a large set of truths all the same, mere characters walking into situations. There are questions to be asked as to the credibility of the script, as there are about the scripts of most of your neighbors, once you...if you bother to get to know them. Linda Purl, the learning disabled girl who runs away from home, ends up tied with Timothy Bottoms, a criminal with way more problems, and that's before you get to the legal ones. Bottoms is more than believable, but Purl is something special with her wide open eyes of wonderment and hope, that the saner ones of us describe as empty and confused. I guess it's a play on that theme (that Andy Warhol didn't make up! and Jesus amplified) of how everyone here has some intrinsic value and potentiality...but they don't ask to be romanticized or exemplified, they know we can't, we won't. I think it's something about how humans need to cross-pollinate each other in order to blossom. So it's situations involving people you wouldn't normally pay any attention to, unless they were a threat or in immediate desperate need, shot against a spectacular backdrops of Alberta and British Columbia. If the dénouement is a bit unseemly, or unlikely, or you expected something different, yeah, most of them are. How much do you know or care about these people, anyway?
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