Ever wonder why young people say, “I wish” almost as much as older people say, “I remember”? They’re merely betraying how they perceive their past and their future, and how that shapes the way they live their present.
Set in 1940s Texas, “The Trip to Bountiful” (1985) features characters who wonder how they might savor life better. They could soak in more of their present instead of pining for their past or fretting about their future. If they learn to do that, they appear to say they’ll be able to approach inevitable death with fewer sorrowful regrets and at least a few more joyful hopes.
Cranky widow Carrie Watts (Geraldine Page) lives with her adult son Ludie (John Heard) and her childless daughter-in-law Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn). The women direct their willfulness largely at each other.
Caught in this womanly crossfire, Ludie tries to make the best of it. Carrie, though, is secretly itching to escape to Bountiful, Texas, the faraway town she remembers from her girlhood. Jessie Mae and Ludie won’t send her alone, even on some nostalgic road trip. Her heart’s too weak.
Bountiful has long since withered. Carrie steals away regardless. En route, she realizes that change in life is certain: some of it good, some of it less so. What matters is adapting to change gracefully.
The now barren Bountiful is, of course, an ironic metaphor for the girl that Carrie once was, a fond but faded fragment of the past. Carrie’s journey is as much inward as it is outward. The trip nudges her toward gratitude for life’s blessings and beauty, however fleeting.
The character of Thelma (Rebecca De Mornay), the young woman she befriends on her bus ride, is a narrative peg, offering Carrie a chance to reflect; she’s talking as much to herself as she is to Thelma.
Carrie’s escapade depicts how the elderly seem to regress to childlike fragility, forgetfulness, and dependence on others to a point where they’re not trusted to choose what’s good for them. After a lifetime of independence, it can be tough to return to accepting that others must tell them what to do, when, where, and how. Frail, Carrie childishly rebels against Jessie Mae’s persistent cries to, “Walk, don’t run!”
Carrie wonders if her precious pension check has more power uncashed because of what it promises, or cashed because of what it fulfills. After her aching conversation with Thelma about fulfilled and unfulfilled love, neither of them has wisecrack solutions to deal with a full, or broken, heart. Yet, Thelma finds Carrie’s recourse to Psalm 91 comforting; perhaps Carrie’s heart isn’t as weak as she thinks.
Carrie speaks heartbreakingly of children she’d lost to disease or some other deprivation as a young mother in Bountiful; if she’d had a grown-up daughter, she wishes she’d be just like Thelma: “Sweet, considerate, thoughtful … and pretty.” Notice how Carrie lists what she’d like to be bountiful in a woman.
Age by itself doesn’t imply maturity. Carrie accepts that her childishness is getting in the way of her getting along with Jessie Mae.
The sheriff and bus station clerk gain Carrie’s respect, although both men are much younger than her. But by respecting someone older than they are, they’re respecting themselves. Through their patience and kindness toward her, they’re admitting that they too will one day, like Carrie, have slower limbs, a feebler voice, and a weaker memory.
Carrie muses about what she considers luck and ill-luck. She suspects that it’s not that God is absent when things don’t go her way or that he’s present when they do. It’s merely that she acknowledges and appreciates his presence only at some times, and only in some places. Ludie nods indulgently when Carrie insists that the sky above Bountiful is the bluest, even if he knows that it’s no bluer than the one back home in Houston.
Clutching faded family album pictures to her chest, Carrie seems to say that photographs are mere objects, the way memories are mere images in our minds. It’s the wisdom in moving on from snapshots of our past, no matter how endearing, that decides whether those memories will comfort, coach, or control us.
