PETER AND THE FARM
Magnolia Pictures
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya
Grade: B
Director: Tony Stone
Written by: Tony Stone
Cast: Peter Dunning
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 10/26/16
Opens: November 4, 2016
If I were asked to name two charismatic people from the idyllic state of Vermont, I would proudly answer: Bernie Sanders and Peter Dunning. The former is an older man whose message and delivery are magnetic enough to draw in a prime target of young people. Bernie is a democratic socialist who believes that people do best when they work together and take responsibility for one another well beyond the needs of their immediate families. Peter, on the other hand, is a farmer whose life has been led largely as an independent provider of organic beef, lamb and pork, and whose existence became even more solitary when his wife left him and his children will not even pick up the phone when he calls.
And charisma is what’s needed when you’re indulging basically in a one-person philosophic session on the big screen. This is the sort of art that does best on the legitimate stage, but what off-Broadway house can fit a few dozen sheep, a handful of cows, a gaggle of geese or ducks, and some intelligent four-legged creatures that eat like pigs?
If you’re a patron of Whole Foods or part of the one percent of the American population that insist on grass-fed, organic beef, “Peter and the Farm” will show you all about what goes into the preparation of that dish and then some. The “and then some” is the principal point as writer-director Tony Stone follows Peter Dunning around as the farmer shows that harvesting hay with John Deere wheels looks like fun but is a lot more complicated. He should know. He’s had thirty-five years’ experience building some 170 acres from scratch, even showing us in the movie audience not only how he gave birth to the land but where in his domain two of his children were conceived.
Despite the 15 minutes, or rather 92 minutes of fame that Tony Stone is giving to the 68-year-old farmer with a thick head of gray hair and an Old Testament beard, Dunning is depressed. At least, his most philosophic moments come at us during these introspective phases, as when he informs us that if the time should come, he would leave this Earth through some contraption that would allow him to bang his head on a rock.
Dunning’s life has taken him as far from the boutique hotels of New York’s SoHo district and the frazzled crowds of Times Square that you can get. Though we don’t see the farmers’ markets that he may use to sell his meats or the middlemen who might purchase his product, we do get to note the one part that might dismay those moviegoers who still think that meat is born in cellophane wrappings at Walmart. After calling his sheep together through a shout unique to the furry creatures—and using the help of his faithful dog which must have at least a trace of Border Collie in his genes—he takes one aside, straddles his head, puts a rifle bullet into his head, and shears the coat in minutes. In fact absent needed fumigation, the wool looks ready to be put on immediately. If you think there’s something disturbing about this assassination, remember that the cows and ducks and geese better scurry if they find themselves in a factory farm where ConAgra treats them as though they’re machines rather than living, breathing creatures with emotions not much unlike those of a human being.
If you choose, however, to look away at Dunning’s killing of a sheep or castration of a cow, you can still dig the man’s introspection about his boozing background, as when on R&R with Marine pals at Honolulu he would sell his plasma monthly and use the $5 blood money for liquor. He may not have to worry about getting too fat on all that meat since during the filming of this doc, he keeps busy threshing, feeding animals, lecturing about how the seeds in one ear of corn could populate the acreage of Kansas. There you have it: Peter Dunning, filmed with dirt under his nails—or least the nails he was able to maintain since a horrible accident decades ago—gives us a picture of one of the last of the breed. He’s doing the kind of work that, believe it or not, 90% of Americans were involved in just a couple of centuries ago, and takes a stand against the corruption of big business with its genetically modified output, “shoving into our mouths whatever the corporations fell like doing.” Nathan Corbin and the director do the photography which is put together by Maxwell Paparella in the editor’s chair.
Unrated. 92 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B
Acting – B+
Technical – B
Overall – A
