Hard questions, hard answers take root in farming drama ‘At Any Price’

TORONTO – The crumbling American dream is rooted deeply in father-son dysfunction in the farming drama “At Any Price,” an ambitious look at the impact of big agribusiness on an Iowa family.

On the surface, nothing could seem more wholesome than the thriving Whipple family. Led by fourth-generation farmer and seed salesman Henry Whipple, the picture-perfect clan is the very model of bliss, complete with a globe-trotting football star son and a budding Don Juan second son, who also happens to be a local race car champ.

However, neither boy wants anything to do with their huckster father, let alone the farm, leaving Henry increasingly desperate to expand the business while his more successful rival, played by Clancy Brown, threatens to undo hard-won sales.

“Vegas” star Dennis Quaid said he immediately saw parallels to Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and set about tackling the woe-begotten Henry as the rural incarnation of Willy Loman.

“This was really, in so many ways, Willy Loman on a farm,” Quaid said during a round of interviews at last September’s Toronto International Film Festival.

“He has this idea of the American dream and he has a lot of bluster and he has these values and principles that bump up against reality.”

There’s an anger seething just below the surface, he noted, with Henry’s stubborn blindness to reality manifesting in a mincing smile and nervous jitter.

The acting choices have earned Quaid raves on the festival circuit, and he said he settled on Henry’s physical quirks by parsing out clues from Ramin Bahrani and Hallie Newton’s script.

“He’s always creaky somewhere. There’s always some tension going on in his spine,” he said of Henry.

“I work sort of outside-in and inside-out at the same time, you know. I like to find a person’s walk and he starts to make me feel a certain way inside.”

Acclaimed director Bahrani admitted to being nervous the first day of shooting because he had yet to see how Quaid would approach the flawed hero.

“I called one of my friends and mentors, Werner Herzog,” recalled Bahrani.

“I said, ‘Werner, I’m starting tomorrow and I have no idea what Dennis is going to do. He hasn’t shown me anything yet.’ And Werner said, ‘Don’t waste their time. They’re professional actors; they know what they’re doing.’ … And after the first day of shooting and after I saw how he was going to stand, how he was going to hold his hand and his shoulders and how he was going to do the performance and the dialogue, I said, ‘My God, this guy’s good.’

“When I put it on the editing table I said, ‘My God, this guy’s great.'”

Bahrani trained his eye on the U.S. heartland after his acclaimed arthouse features “Man Push Cart,” “Chop Shop” and “Goodbye Solo.”

He freely admitted to courting a broader audience with a more traditional morality tale, although he noted there are stark plot turns that veer from the standard Hollywood ending.

“A big part of the film for me, I think, is just how to make an accessible movie, more (so) than my previous films,” he said. “Potentially even some of the storylines seem conventional, but look again they’re not.”

Bahrani said he was also driven by a simple interest in food production. He spent six months living with farmers in Iowa to gain insight into their daily hurdles.

“I heard the same expressions over and over again — ‘Get big or get out’ and ‘Expand or die.’ And I wanted to know what happens to a man and a family when you value expansion more than your community, your friends, your neighbours and yourself,” said Bahrani.

“And I think you can look at the film as a parallel to the housing crisis, the banking crisis, the global economic crisis, where our values are a little bit out of whack right now.”

Former Disney kid Zac Efron plays Henry’s younger son Dean. He’s spent much of his life under the shadow of his older brother Grant and dreams of one day leaving the farm to become a NASCAR driver.

But when Grant decides to climb mountains in Argentina rather than help out at home, Dean becomes the focus of Henry’s obsession with legacy.

Efron noted the role is yet another conscious step away from his teeny bopper image, admitting he was drawn to Dean’s hard-edged will — which sharpens in surprising ways as the story unfolds.

“This is my ‘expand or die,'” joked Efron, who said he hopes to build a diverse acting career in the vein of Paul Newman.

“This was sort of uncharted territory for me. I had never sort of, I guess, attempted a role quite like this. But (it had) the layers and complexities of a very loving young man, a very good person that is forced to do some pretty heinous things in the film. And it was very much an experiment.”

Efron noted that he grew up in small-town northern California and so he immediately connected with his character’s desire to move on to bigger things in life.

“I grew up in a small town myself and there’s always that strive amongst the young generation to want to get out, you know,” said Efron.

“Also his closeness with his family and wanting above all things to protect them and to make sure that they are as well off as they can be, but it’s weird because they’re conflicting. There’s two emotions. Those two things don’t quite fit with each other. For me, theatre was my kind of way out. That was this thing that I found that was, like Dean’s racing in the movie, my chance to escape.”

Quaid lauded the film for diving headlong into difficult questions, while reflecting the larger global economic crisis.

“What is the definition of the American dream? No one knows what that is anymore. You always had this feeling of upward mobility and now there’s this feeling that your kids are not going to live as well as you did.”

“At Any Price” opens Friday in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.