If Jacques Tati had ever made a documentary it might have looked something like this: an inconsequential but humorous look at life in a community so far off the beaten track (on the Florida panhandle, some 90 miles west of Tallahassee) that the town's only law enforcement officer sits bored in his patrol car hour after hour, waiting to cite the occasional speeder. Director Errol Morris's strategy is simple: keep the camera rolling, and don't interrupt. The result is an oddly skewed but still endearing portrait of back-roads America, shot in grainy 16mm and rambling on for about sixty minutes before arriving at an abrupt non-ending. Among the town's more-or-less typical citizens (from a population of 885 at the time) are a worm farmer, an elderly couple with a jar of what they believe is radioactive sand, and a hunter in camouflage fatigues tracking wild turkey with the life-or-death conviction of Hemingway on safari.
Review of Vernon, Florida
