Review: Those Calloways (DMC #41)
It’s not officially autumn yet, but we’re already feeling the autumn and winter vibes after watching Those Calloways last night! This marks the 41st film in our Disnerd Movie Challenge! If you didn’t watch with us last night, check the synopsis for a recap, otherwise skip right ahead to our review!
Synopsis
In the small town of Swiftwater, everyone looks to the skies when the geese migration arrives. Some, like Whit Turner, look forward to hunting the geese, but Bucky Calloway and his father Cam Calloway are against killing the geese. When Bucky catches Whit trying to shoot the geese, he fights Whit and takes an awful beating in front of the whole town, including Bridie Mellott, who seems smitten with Bucky nonetheless. A new man in town, Dell Fraser, sees the geese migration as an excellent business opportunity to turn the sleepy town into a hunter’s paradise, but the men of the town remind him that the geese don’t stop in Swiftwater every year. Meanwhile, Cam has a plan to purchase a plot of nearby marshland to create a geese sanctuary where the geese can safely stop every year. All nature’s signs point to a great fur trapping season ahead, and he hopes to use the money from selling furs to buy the marshland. His wife, Liddy, thinks it a foolish idea to spend such money on geese when they barely have money enough to meet their own needs. Later, Bridie delivers the post to Bucky and tries to flirt with him, but Bucky is oblivious. Bucky takes the post from her—traps for his father, and a book for Bucky: “The Manly Art of Self Defense”—and heads to the barn to practice his fighting skills. Cam catches him and the two practice sparring. The next day, Cam and Bucky go into the woods for a scouting trip to find the best trapping grounds. Cam reveals to Bucky that they’ll have better luck if they trap where no one has trapped before—the Jack Pine Camp. Nigosh, Cam’s Mi’kmaq friend, warns them not to go. The Miꞌkmaq say it’s a land of bad spirits, but Cam doesn’t believe it. While exploring the Jack Pine, Cam falls and breaks his leg. While he returns home safely, Bucky must go trapping alone if their family is to survive. Bucky takes the family dog with him to trap in the Jack Pine, but a wolverine raids his first set of traps, so Bucky hunts the wolverine, fights it, and kills it, taking its pelt home as a trophy.
Alf Simes, a friend of the Calloways, tells them of Dell Fraser’s plan to renovate the town. Liddy tells Alf about Cam’s plan to make the geese stop every year by buying the marshland and planting corn near the lake. Alf likes the idea of protecting the geese and mentions they might be able to get a federal grant to protect the land, but Alf is terrible at keeping secrets, as evidenced by him nearly giving away Bucky’s idea to make Liddy an ermine cape for a Christmas present. Later, Bucky takes the ermine furs to Bridie so they can pick out a cape pattern and ask Bridie’s mother to make the cape for Liddy. Bridie again tries to flirt with Bucky, but Bucky still thinks of Bridie like a kid sister. At Christmas, Cam and Bucky present Liddy with the ermine cape and she cries tears of joy. When Bridie arrives for the Christmas party in a red dress, Bucky seems to notice her for the first time and is smitten. A few days after Christmas, Bucky goes to see Bridie at her house, but he sees her dancing with Whit through the window and turns back home. Later, when Cam and Bucky take their furs into town to sell them, Jim Mellott breaks the news to them: the fur market tanked. Back at home, Cam breaks the news to Liddy. They can’t get the $1,800 Cam had banked on. They only managed to get $450 for all their furs. What’s more, Cam used $400 to put a down payment on the marshland rather than pay off their rent. Liddy scolds him for such foolishness. When their landowner comes to collect the rent, Cam tells him they’ll be out of the house by the next morning. Liddy tells Cam they’ll build a new house on the marshland by the lake.
Dell Fraser comes to the marshland where the Calloways are hard at work building their new home. Alf told him about Cam’s plan to make the geese stop here. Dell claims to be interested in the geese sanctuary, and offers to ask his boss, E.J. Fletcher, to help pay for the land. Cam considers it. After the townsfolk help the Calloways finish raising the walls of their new home, Bridie confronts Bucky and asks why he’s been ignoring her. He reveals he was jealous of her and Whit, but in spite of Bucky’s aggressive advances, Bridie tells Bucky he was the only boy she was ever interested in. Months later when the corn is fully grown, E.J. Fletcher and Dell Fraser arrive with a duck blind and install it on the outskirts of the lake. Cam discovers them and tells the men the geese aren’t coming down this year, and he’ll pay back the $200 Fletcher gave him. Cam then burns down the corn despite Liddy and Cam’s protests. At a town meeting to discuss the geese and the town’s future, Alf addresses the town and tries to sway them to sell their land to the government to create a geese sanctuary, while Dell tries to convince them to develop the land for hunting tourism. When the geese arrive, the hunting begins, and Cam is shot while trying to stop the hunters. While an unconscious Cam gets a blood transfusion from Nigosh that will hopefully save him from death, Alf again appeals to the townspeople to save the geese. The next morning, the sound of the geese finally wakes Cam. Liddy, Bucky, and Bridie celebrate his recovery, and Alf arrives to tell Cam that they did it—the town voted to save the geese.
Thoughts Before Watching
Kevin: This is another film I hadn’t even heard of until this challenge was put together. It doesn’t look familiar either. Is that actor in the hiking gear the guy who played the father in The Parent Trap? Sure looks like him! Anyway, I can see that we’re returning to the frontier, and movies with those settings have so far been mostly misses with maybe one or two hits. I’m hoping this one is the latter!
Megan: I hadn’t heard of Those Calloways until we started this challenge, either. I did, however, catch a few of the opening clips of this film while my parents watched it (it was one of their early picks when we first got Disney Plus). I’m not quite sure what to expect with this film. The title makes me think about outlaws, but the description on Disney Plus makes this sound like the complete opposite. It already has an outdated cultural depictions warning, so I imagine we might have some issues with this one. I guess we’ll see how this goes.
Thoughts After Watching
So. Much. Filler. And unrelatable characters.
Kevin: This film was disappointing. There’s a lot to unpack here, which we’ll go over below, but one thing that I originally noticed is how unnecessarily long this movie is. It’s packed with a lot of plot elements that really don’t go anywhere and don’t serve the characters. Did we really need the extensive scene of Bucky’s hunting expedition? So much of that scene is just Sounder playing around in the snow. It dragged on too much. We really didn’t need extra attention on Keg the bear, either. The fighting scenes between Bucky and Whit are also much longer than they need to be (although I’m also not a fan of many fight scenes from older movies because they look more fake than anything). The romance was also unneeded, especially since Bucky and Bridie have absolutely no chemistry. It’s like Disney and filmmakers believe the only way to appeal to teenagers is to have romance, even if it really does nothing to serve the story being told. It’s also hard to root for the main family. I really can’t buy Cam’s insistence on protecting the geese when he and Bucky are just as much hunters as other characters are. As the movie dragged on, I found myself having no sympathy at all for Cam’s troubles, all of which are really his fault. The same goes for his son, Bucky. The film is jam packed with weak character motivations and relations, and tons of filler, that I was both bored and annoyed by the end.
Is it just me, or are the Calloways hypocritical?
Megan: At the outset, I was very much on Bucky’s side as he fights to protect the geese, especially when it was revealed that the geese don’t always stop in Swiftwater—all the more reason to protect them and offer them a spot to rest along their migration route. However, the Calloways sure seem choosy about which animals are and aren’t okay to hunt. Geese? Absolutely not. Just about any animal with fur? Be my guest! Their logic seems puzzling. Why hunt a wolverine, ermine, raccoons, etc. for their fur yet stand so firmly against hunting geese? The only reason we’re given is that the Mi’kmaq see the wild geese as their totem animal, and Cam, raised by the Mi’kmaq, has a kinship with them. As Nigosh says, “Each time a wild goose falls, a Mi’kmaq dies.” However, I find it hard to believe that Cam is protecting the geese for spiritual reasons since he seems to take no stock in the Mi’kmaq warning about the Jack Pine Camp being a place of bad spirits. Even as someone who’s all for environmental protections, I find it hard to get on board with the Calloways’ mission to protect the geese when we don’t really understand why they’re so adamant about protecting the geese in the first place. Also, I know I’ve mentioned this before, but thank goodness there are now animal protections in place for films! Not only do we see geese being shot and killed in this film, but we see all sorts of other animal actors getting into dangerous or unnatural situations that certainly wouldn’t be allowed by today’s standards.
Bucky’s character arc is rooted in toxic masculinity.
Kevin: I wasn’t raised to use fighting to solve issues and I think that’s a good thing. Professional fighting aside, I don’t understand the fascination with men fighting each other as a means to solve problems, or why it’s something to be cheered on. Bucky Calloway is this movie’s stereotypical gruff teenager on the verge of manhood who wants to prove how much of a man he really is. One of the ways this comes out is in Bucky’s attempt to fight Whit Turner, the town bully, for having shot down a goose flying overhead and scaring the entire flock. Now, I think there are some fights you can’t always escape from, and while Bucky does deserve commendation for how much care he has for the geese, there was arguably a better way to handle this. I also get that everyone in the town thinks the Calloways are kooks, so perhaps Bucky feels he has no choice but to fight. I still don’t agree with it. Besides, Bucky is the one to attack Whit first, so I would argue that Bucky has no true provocation. Anyway, Bucky and Whit fight, and it seems like everyone in town is there to watch (or at least, all the men). Not a single person steps in to try stopping the fight, with the exception of Bridie. Instead, the men seem to watch Bucky and Whit with rapt attention, as if things like this are common occurrence and you just have to watch it play out. The fight only ends when Bridie’s father orders the two to stop (the problem is, he, too, had not tried to stop the boys beforehand until Bridie begged him to). Whit easily beats Bucky and Bucky is left looking visibly humiliated. Bridie’s father offers some medical aid which Bucky turns down. Bridie herself also tries to help Bucky but he shrugs her off and leaves, his pride wounded. Bucky is then seen at several points in the movie trying to learn how to fight, mostly with help from a book and a tiny bit of help from his father.
So at the outset we get a man to man brawl, no one bothering to stop it, one of the men losing the fight and subsequently rejecting all help, skulking away in bitterness, and deciding the best way to fix the issue and his wounded pride is to become better at fighting. Aggression, pride, stoicism, and refusing help are all seen as typical masculine traits and are considered normal during this time.
Kevin: Bucky’s arc continues much in the same way. His attempts to pursue Bridie are rife with stereotypical manly choices, including aggression (both passive and active) and jealousy. He is passive aggressive when he suddenly becomes distant and cold towards Bridie after seeing her dancing with Whit. This is where Bucky’s jealously comes in. What he saw upsets him, and I don’t actually blame him. It’s not him being upset that’s the problem, but that he doesn’t deal with it in a healthy way. In spite of his loathing of Whit, Bucky makes no attempt to rationalize why Whit was there, either by way of sorting it out himself or, y’know, just talking to Bridie and asking her what was going on. So he instead treats Bridie with cold indifference until she is able to be alone with him and finally ask what she did wrong. This is where Bucky’s active aggression comes in. His pent up frustration causes him to explode with anger. He yells at Bridie who is obviously confused and shocked, though she also tries to laugh off the situation as she realizes Bucky has obviously misunderstood. Unfortunately, it just bothers Bucky more, and eventually he grabs her and restrains her, kissing her on the lips while she makes attempts to escape. She walks away from him, sadly telling him that she was interested in him but no longer knows who he is. Take note that after this happens, it is Bridie who apologizes for what happened even though she did nothing wrong. Bucky, on the other hand, does no such thing, nor do I remember him apologizing later on.
While this incident seems to work out in Bucky’s favor since he eventually wins over Bridie, it doesn’t really mean much in the end. Near the end of the film Bucky and Whit go for round two. Again, Bucky feels provoked, this time after Whit mocks his father. I’m not saying Whit doesn’t necessarily deserve a good punch, but I think a better way to make this happen would have been for Bucky to win either through words or self-defense. Bucky is obviously confident enough to confront Whit in any context, so he could have instead just given Whit a verbal beat down instead of a physical one. While not always the case, bullies generally lose power when they’re stood up to. To show that Bucky learned something, he could have stood up to Whit with words. Or, if Bucky tried to reason with Whit, but Whit decided to hit him, then Bucky would be forced to defend himself. In either case, Bucky would win by being the better man. Unfortunately, in this time period, the better man is the one who beats another in a physical fight. Bucky is again the instigator of this second brawl. He throws himself at Whit, and this time he comes out victorious. Once again, the onlookers do just that, not stepping in until it is clear Whit has been defeated. What’s made worse is that this somehow makes Bridie interested in him again. It just feels disappointing that she is adverse to Bucky’s aggressive tendencies, but all appears forgiven once Bucky takes it out on another man. Bucky’s character starts off with manly aggression and ends the same way. His only victory is that he won a fight (and, quite undeservedly, the girl, too), but I would very much say he did not come out a better man at all.
Like father, like son.
Megan: It would also appear that Bucky’s toxic masculinity is learned from his father, Cam. The one scene I found most surprising was Cam’s stoicism when he breaks his leg and tries to set it himself using a rope as a makeshift pulley. Okay, yes, these are actors, and the actor playing Cam did not really break his leg, so he had to act like he was in a kind of pain he likely hadn’t experienced before. Maybe it was just bad acting, but I’m inclined to think it wasn’t. Men, after all, are not “supposed to” show weakness (if you buy into society’s ideas of what makes a “real” man, that is). Pain is an expression of weakness, and thus “unmanly.” By not showing how much pain Cam is in, it’s as if the film is saying “Look! This man was brutally injured and he doesn’t so much as shout or wince or cry! How very masculine of him!” In my personal experience, broken bones hurt like hell, and the only reason I could see to attempt to muffle any reflexive cry of pain would be if you were in imminent danger from something far worse than a broken bone and needed to keep quiet so as not to reveal your position. While Cam and Bucky had the uneasy sensation that they were being watched, there was no such imminent danger that Cam needed to remain quiet. The only other person there was Bucky. Did Cam really need to prove to his son how tough he was—even when he clearly needed help? While Cam does accept Bucky’s assistance here, his stoicism seems unnecessary, and quite honestly, it makes his injury unconvincing.
The pitfalls of being female in a man’s story.
Megan: For a film that’s based on a book written by a man (Swiftwater was written by Paul Annixter) and adapted for the screen by yet another man (Louis Pelletier wrote the screenplay), I was surprised this film actually barely scraped by in passing the Bechdel test. One conversation saves this film from Bechdel test failure: when Liddy, Bridie, and Sarah Mellott (Bridie’s mother) talk about the ermine cape that Sarah made for Liddy at Bucky’s request. The women then head off-screen together, where presumably more Bechdel-test-worthy conversations are had, though the audience is not privy to them. That’s about as good as it gets for the women in this story, however. It’s clear from the outset that the few women characters (and there are quite few—I counted only four women who made the IMDb cast list, compared to nineteen men) have no say in what happens to them or those around them.
Take Liddy, for example. Liddy constantly tells Cam they need to be smart about how they spend what little money they have, and yet Cam blows $400 of their $450 on buying a marsh for the geese rather than paying the rent—and he only tells Liddy about it after the fact. Cam also refuses to tell Liddy why he doesn’t want Bucky trapping in the Jack Pine alone, and he seems to ignore Liddy’s constant complaints about the “zoo” of animals on their property. Sure, Cam and Bucky do somewhat listen to Liddy since they do remember she’s been wanting an ermine cape, and they manage to surprise her with one for Christmas. However, that seems like such a trivial thing to pay attention to what with everything else that’s going on. Cam also listens to Liddy when she says they’ll just build a new house on the marsh land, except she only came up with that solution as a way to fix the problem that Cam got them into in the first place. It seems to me that if Cam had treated Liddy as an equal partner in their marriage a lot of their problems could have been avoided in the first place. Or, at the very least, they could have found a way to solve those problems together, and walked into them somewhat knowingly.
Kevin: That whole exchange was frustrating to watch. Not just because Cam got himself and his family into big trouble, but because it’s clear that Cam and Liddy are not on equal footing. Throw in mismanagement of money, and you have a recipe for disaster. The story and setting show men having all the power, while women just simply do as they’re told. This implies that Cam’s actions, while foolish, are justified all the same because he is the man of the house and is the decision-maker. Liddy gets no say other than reprimanding him. The movie does show Cam facing repercussions for his actions, I will give it that credit, but there is still a power imbalance.
Megan: Bridie, too, is rarely listened to. Bridie’s insistence that Whit and Bucky stop fighting goes unheeded, even when she asks her father to stop the fight (he only intervenes after it’s clear the fight is over and Whit just has to get one more hit in, not so much because Bridie asks him to). When Bridie tells Bucky he and his family should farm their land to make a living, Bucky tells Bridie he and his Pa don’t need to tie themselves down to any one piece of land. As Bridie tries to tell him that a woman like his Ma wants to settle down someplace, Bucky tells her “How would you know what a woman wants?” It seems unnecessary that Bridie should have to explain to Bucky that she is, in fact, a woman, yet she does. Though, oddly, Bucky still seems to not believe her. (I think we’re meant to take this as Bucky still thinking of Bridie as a girl, not a woman, but it still seems ridiculous since it sounds like he’s implying Bridie isn’t female.) Bucky only briefly listens to Bridie when he can play the gallant hero after the log he’s cutting drops and accidentally injures her foot. Yet the next time Bucky and Bridie are together, he again laughs at her when she insists she is a grown woman and no longer the little kid he thinks her to be. When Bridie wears the red dress to the Christmas party, Bucky seems to finally “see” Bridie, yet it’s hard to say he really listens to her while he’s gawking at her.
The ugly duckling trope & the beginnings of an unhealthy relationship
Megan: Let’s talk about Bridie in the red dress for a minute. Up until that point in the film, Bucky hadn’t “seen” Bridie. That is, he didn’t see her as a romantic interest, despite Bridie’s obvious infatuation with him. Much as Prince Derek in The Swan Princess sings of how Odette “started out as such an ugly duckling, then somehow suddenly became a swan,” Bucky only sees Bridie as a romantic interest once she’s wearing a red dress. In other words, only once she’s “beautiful” does he stop seeing her as the “ugly duckling.” The trope appears in several movies, and, honestly, it usually leaves me feeling very much like Odette when she asks Derek what, besides her beauty, Derek likes about her, and he rather unfortunately replies “What else is there?” (facepalm). While it is true that people can find themselves suddenly attracted to someone they’ve known as a friend for years, I don’t think it’s ever quite as dramatic a shift as movies would have us believe. In this particular instance, it makes me dislike Bucky for his superficial attraction.
Kevin: This is a common trope in media and I’m not sure why it’s still a thing. There are many examples of men being friends with women, with implications of either unrequited or mutual interest. An additional trope in storytelling is that men and women cannot possibly just be friends with each other, and instead must eventually become romantically involved (full disclosure: Megan and I were friends for almost 7 years before we started dating, but thankfully we’re not characters in a story). The issue isn’t the friends-turned-lovers plot itself—it’s perfectly fine to use it as long as it’s believable. The issue is when it’s used on a couple that isn’t believable, and Bucky and Bridie certainly are not. Like Megan said, Bucky only seems to show true interest in Bridie once she puts on a pretty dress. This is insulting not only to Bridie’s character, but Bucky’s as well. The message is that a man can only be interested in a woman if she looks beautiful, and so they are left to be shallow. I’m not saying physical attraction isn’t important. It definitely plays a factor, but it is not the only one, and it does not help men, women, or other genders to define romantic attraction so narrowly.
Megan: My dislike for Bucky only grows after the dance scene when Bridie confronts him about why he has been ignoring her. First of all, Bridie is the one who opens the conversation by asking Bucky what she did wrong. Even though she did absolutely nothing, she’s the one who’s ready to take the blame for Bucky’s actions. When Bridie tries to clear up the misunderstanding, Bucky (again) won’t listen to her. He angrily demands she give him a dance lesson like she did Whit Turner, and when Bridie tries to leave the situation, Bucky grabs her and forcefully kisses her. Through tears, Bridie tells Bucky she’s not interested in anyone but Bucky, but she tells him “I guess I don’t know you as well as I always figured.” Then, after all that, it is Bridie who says “I’m sorry” and runs off. She has nothing to apologize for, yet society has so conditioned women to apologize for everything that she instinctively apologizes to Bucky. Meanwhile, Bucky never apologizes for his actions! He assaults the only friend he has, and his love interest, and he can’t even say “sorry”?! Yet by the end, Bridie seems to have forgiven Bucky. Perhaps in such a small town with few dating prospects, Bucky is preferable to Whit, but still, a woman has to have some standards!
A note about unattainable female beauty ideals
Megan: When Bridie pulls out a catalog image of a woman in an elegant dress and shows it to Bucky, asking him what he’d think of her in a dress like that, Bucky laughs at her, so she rattles off her measurements: 34, 22, 34. In other words, 34-inch bust, 22-inch waist, 34-inch hips. Something about these measurements didn’t sit right with me, so I went to look at a few online store sizing guides. If Bridie’s measurements are to be believed, in juniors’ clothing sizes she’d be a size 7 at her bust, yet a size 0 waist, and a size 1 hip. In women’s wear sizes, that translates to a size 4 bust, even smaller than a size 0 waist (size 0 waist in women’s begins around 25 inches), and a smaller than size 0 hip (size 0 hip in women’s begins around 35 inches). While it is true that no woman fits the standard department store clothing sizes to the letter, I find it hard to believe that a 17-year-old would have 34, 22, 34 measurements naturally. Someone who is narrow enough in waist and hips to fit into size 0 typically has a similarly small bust. (I say this as a woman who wore size 0 clothing as a teen before puberty hit.) Since this film was written by a man and based on a book written by a man, I have to assume these men were working off some beauty standard ideal that was popular at the time, rather than finding accurate numbers. It feels like the result of a Google search for ideal body measurements rather than an authentic aspect of Bridie’s character. Do the actress’s real measurements even match the numbers she rattles off? I suspect not, though I don’t believe we can confirm it. Still, this oversight, while a small detail within the film, could prove damaging for female audiences when compounded with all the other media messages girls and women receive about what makes an “ideal” body, and how contorting their body into an unnatural size is the way to win a man’s affections.
Outdated cultural depictions
Megan: So, we knew this was coming from the disclaimer in the Disney Plus description, but it is still a bit jarring nowadays to watch some of these older films and see how they depicted Native Americans. This film isn’t nearly as bad as some of the films we’ve seen (no one appeared to be painted red in this one at least), but it doesn’t do much to change perceptions, either. For example, Cam is seen as crazy by the townspeople because of his kinship with the Mi’kmaq tribe. The Mi’kmaq are referred to as “Indians” throughout the film, and Cam himself even teaches Bucky “Indian fighting” which in the context of this film means fighting dirty by tripping your opponent during a fist fight. Even though Nigosh saves Cam’s life by giving him a blood transfusion, the doctor comments that hopefully the “Indian blood” will save him. While some of this seems complimentary, it’s leaning on stereotypes of Native Americans being strong, untrustworthy (re: fighting dirty), and uncivilized (re: their connection to nature). These stereotypes only further alienate Native Americans. What’s more, as Kevin pointed out after we watched the film, the actor who plays Nigosh, Frank de Kova, is described as “Italian-American” according to Wikipedia. Though it’s possible he could have had some Native American heritage mixed in, it doesn’t make for a very authentic portrayal. Perhaps if the casting director had hired a Native American to play a Native American the depictions might have been better.
Verdict
Megan: 3
Kevin: 2
Final Score: 2.5
What did you think of Those Calloways? Tell us in the comments below!