If you are familiar with the work of director Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop), then his new movie will surprise you. Not only is At Any Price not set in New York (as two of his three features are), it is not shot with a grimy, improvised style that brings the lives of immigrants or the overlooked underclasses out from the rock under which they seem to hide. Instead, Bahrani has exported his talent to middle America, and Iowa-set At Any Price is the product of the years the American filmmaker spent living with a farming family in the heartland.
What Bahrani does bring from his earlier works is a vision of the individual caught in a swirl of exterior forces: social, economic, political, and personal. The movie revolves around the Whipple family. Patriarch Henry (Dennis Quaid, with the film’s strongest performance) hopes to leave the family farm to his son Grant, a football star at Iowa State. But Grant has graduated college and hasn’t come home, instead opting for adventure in the mountains of South America. The reality Henry can’t quite face up to is the fact that Grant doesn’t want to inherit the family farm, just as his younger son, Dean (Zac Efron) dreams of riding racing cars into stardom and out of his home town.
The film’s essential conflict is between father and son, but Bahrani develops a number of subplots that give greater dimension to the interpersonal dynamic. In addition to farming his land, Henry work as a genetically modified seed salesman, but his book has come under threat from rival salesman. Dean is a firebrand, shooting up a storefront to steel a piece of machinery for his souped-up dirt track race car. His performance in the figure eight circuit wins him the opportunity to compete at the top level (and the pressure to succeed that comes with it). There is also infidelity, fist fights, corporate theft, and other down and dirty doings that belie the ever-polite, grimacing manners of the Midwestern setting.
Knowing Bahrani’s earlier work, there is a temptation to see some of the hokey, more deliberate and forced aspects of At Any Price’s intended foiling of Midwestern stereotypes as the product of urbane kneejerk to touching down in flyover country. Glamour shots of the American flag, music video-like scenes of teenagers making out in hot rods, and other Americana kitsch suggest Bahrani is trying to stir up an Altman-esque panorama of American life that touches allegorically on aspects of contemporary political and economic life. But the setting fails to fully congeal. Instead, much of the first two acts of the film play like an orchestration of gently disrupted stereotypes. It’s melodrama on the plains, like a middle class Dallas written for an Iowa farm that tries to raise our eyebrows with GPS-powered tractors and cutthroat power brokers who wear jeans.
Bahrani, however, does find his form in the third act, when a number of sudden plot twists bring to bear what the filmmaker seems to have been trying to do all along: constructed high familial tragedy that rings of Shakespeare or Faulkner in the way it tangles courage and hubris, fidelity and Greek miasma. At Any Price is easily Bahrani’s worst film to date, but like all great directors, even in his failure there is something lasting, ponderous, and real.
