The next movie I take in is a supremely odd one that received a critical mauling upon its 2017 release, though I can’t see that much wrong with it. By even this early stage in my filmic adventure, I’ve seen much, much worse. Pottersville tells the weird tale of Maynard (Michael Shannon), a friendly shopkeeper in the titular all-American town who gets mistaken for Bigfoot during a drunken rampage while wearing a gorilla costume at Christmas time. The quiet little town suddenly gains national attention, with a popular TV ‘monster hunter’ paying a visit, forcing Maynard into a tough decision.
It's plenty weird with an unusual plot, but I enjoy its nice festive vibe and the fact that this doesn’t seem to be a type of film anyone has tried to do before. In this age of remakes, franchises and reboots, I’m always glad to see something a little different.
Maynard recognises that his marriage to Connie (Christina Hendricks) is struggling, so finishes work early only to find his missus in a bizarre tryst with the town sheriff (Ron Perlman). They’re not having sex, though – they’re ‘furries’ (google it) and just enjoy dressing up in furry animal suits and doing a bit of rubbing. Try and think of a time when you’ve seen that in a holiday movie. The whole furry thing is played for laughs, with no real attempt to explore the subculture – this is just our gateway to further silliness.
Maynard’s never been drunk since his wedding night, but seeing his wife being massaged by a giant rabbit-man leaves him shaken and he bolts off to get hammered on moonshine. In an oddly romantic move, he then cobbles together his own furry gorilla costume – figuring Connie might dig it - and tears off into the night to try and win her back.
He blacks out and awakens to blanket news coverage of ‘Bigfoot Fever.’ The town is suddenly famous and a popular spot for monster-seeking tourists. Having inadvertently given the sleepy, failing town hope of a resurgence, Maynard’s in a bit of a jam and when Thomas Lennon’s insufferable, phoney Steve Irwin-like celebrity monster hunter shows up, Maynard is forced to don the costume again.
It’s sweet enough but can’t decide if it wants to be a risqué comic farce or uplifting tale of romance and small-town values. There are plenty of moments that seem ripe with comedic promise, but it never quite goes full-on bonkers like you hope it might, like when the hunters stumble across a ‘furry convention’ in the woods. It’s a vivid, freaky moment, but over all too quickly, barely scratching the surface of this odd, fascinating subculture.
If there’s a villain here, it’s Lennon’s phoney “showboating coward who isn’t even a real Australian” hunter Brock Masterson. Lennon tends to be a reliable comic presence and brings most of the laughs here as a charlatan forced to ‘walk the walk’ by spending a few nights in the wild, with Ian McShane’s real-deal deranged woodsman and Perlman’s thinly-sketched cop. There are a few enjoyable, if obvious Jaws parallels, as these three misfits band together to catch the ‘beast.’
I find the film quite watchable precisely because the filmmakers somehow managed to coax all these cracking character actors to be in it. Shannon gives a more restrained performance than you might expect, given his history of playing sinister and tortured guys. Here, he just seems like a nice dude with a hidden undercurrent of melancholy – a guy doing some weird stuff because he wants to make others happy.
The movie doesn’t seem to have too much in common with Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life, from which the town of Pottersville takes its name, but there is still a decent festive message here about selflessness and kindness being its own reward. For me, it’s a slightly muddled, messy film but by no means the disaster that a stream of One-Star reviews have painted it as. It’s a perfectly decent, unusual little film and I enjoy it just fine.
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