Scoop's notes

The Turning is a movie adapted from a play ("Home Fires Burning"), and it shows. It's a "serious drama" in which five characters deliver stagy speeches on claustrophobic sets.

A young man returns to his home town after a four year absence. He doesn't seem to be a very happy fellow, given his predilection for Nazi t-shirts and his ability to antagonize everyone in town. His motivation for returning is gradually revealed to be the simple-minded hope that he can keep his parents from divorcing, and he plans to accomplish that by terrorizing dad's new girlfriend into leaving. Ignoring the reality of his parents' broken relationship, he reasons that the disappearance of the girlfriend will drive dad back into mom's alcoholic, trailer-trash arms. The kid's world-view gives the impression that he's not the brightest bulb on the family tree, but his mother doesn't seem like a candidate for the Schweitzer Chair either. In fact, she might have some trouble operating a rocking chair.

Blah, blah, blah ... Melodramatic speeches made with knives at other people's throats. Etc. It seems like one of those William Inge plays from the 1950s.

This film was made in 1992 and sat on the shelves unreleased for five years, waiting for Gillian Anderson to become a big TV star in The X-Files, at which point it was released to video in a box which featured a close up of Ms. Anderson tugging at her bodice, even though she is the fifth lead, and has a part which is not even essential to the story's main development. The film probably would never have been released at all if Gillian had never become a star. It has been more than a dozen years since The Turning was made, and the auteur of this film never had another IMDb credit, either as a writer or a director.

The film is memorable for only two things: (1) it represented 24-year-old Gillian Anderson's feature film debut; (2) it remained for fifteen years the only time Ms. Anderson had removed her bra for art. Gillian did look ripe and sexy, but she did not do an exceptional acting job in her small role, and her supposed small-town Virginia accent is actually just some kind of Generic Confederate, via Foghorn Leghorn.

I love these facts from Gillian's IMDb bio:

In high school, was voted "Class Clown" and "Most Bizarre Girl". Was voted "Most Likely to be Arrested" by her classmates in high school, and was, in fact, arrested on graduation night for trying to glue the locks shut at her high school.

I'll bet she is an interesting person.

Tuna's notes

The Turning (1992) was made and then shelved until a fortuitous thing happened. One of the supporting players became famous. Not only that, but this long-forgotten property contained her only on-screen nudity. The actress is Gillian Anderson, who showed her breasts. This was a compelling enough reason to release the film in 1997, five years after it was made, but if not for the fortuitous convergence between the movies' Gillian Anderson  nudity and Gillian's subsequent fame on The X-Files, the film would probably still be languishing in a can.

Raymond J. Barry returns to his home town in rural West Virginia. His drunken trailer trash mother has notified him that she and his philandering coal miner father are divorcing, because daddy has a new girlfriend. This goes against his white supremacist family values, so he resolves to go home and prevent the divorce. His training and experience as a Neo Nazi and KKK member inspires a somewhat unorthodox approach to this matchmaking. His father's new girlfriend, Tess Harper, who nailed her character, was tougher than he thought and equal to the challenge. Gillian played his former girlfriend in a small role, but one that facilitated much of his character development.

This film covers some of the same ground as American History X, but owes its origins to a stage play, "Home Fires Burning," which dooms it from the start. The subject, as American History X proved so well, is certainly fodder for compelling cinema, but this project was unable to shake its theatrical roots. I can see that the subject matter and intense but static scenes may have been compelling on a stage, especially in an intimate venue, but nothing about this screenplay was cinematic. A large part of the problem was the dialogue, probably lifted directly from the play, which was simply too large for the screen, and too flowery. Barry's character, by his own admission, was white trash. His supremacist propaganda rants could be explained by indoctrination, but the rest of his dialogue was far too flowery for poor white trash. Other characters suffered from the same stage prose problem.