What the Deaf Man Heard
An exercise in futility for me. Jake played the supposedly nasty Tolliver Tynan, son of a deceased but wealthy man. The will leaves the family fortune to the eldest born child. Jake plays Tolliver as the ever optimistic plotter who, if he ever bothered to turn his energies to something constructive, probably could have made something of himself. His bangs were grown out long and worn sort of in a wave back over his forehead. It was also very, very blonde although not white-blonde. He wore some rather interesting suits, bow-ties and sunglasses. He also seemed to be having fun and got to do a "southern" accent since this supposedly took place in a small town in Georgia but it was filmed in - you got it - Wilmington, NC.
I had watched this show just wanting to be entertained watching Jake do his thing. However, there were so many inconsistencies that my tired brain kicked in and started questioning things. We were all supposed to hiss at Tolliver but whoever wrote the script had twists and turns that didn't make sense. Sammy kept harping in a voice over throughout the entire movie about a cherry bomb incident that happened when Sammy first came into town. But they were all children, so what was the big deal? Even non-spoiled brats and bullies might have done such a thing.
Also, it was really hard to say who was more duplicit, Tolliver or Sammy. Of course, as it turns out, they're "half" brothers and given their father's actions, I'd say they were both chips off the old block.
Mr. Thacker, played by James Earl Jones [yes, Darth Vader] was also a duplicit individual. He pretended to be a junk man but he was actually very wealthy and had land-holdings. He also ran moonshine and when he almost got caught by the cops, his sons hid it in the baptismal font. But he was supposed to be a good guy.
He was also willing to get Tolliver to use more of the church's money to buy swamp land. True, it might have exposed Tolliver's nonsense but who did it really hurt in the end? The church goers.
Mr. Tynan - the dead one - oh what a great, big hearted winner he was. Turns out that Sammy is the bastard that Tynan begat with his secretary. Sammy was born like maybe a few minutes before Tolliver, making him the oldest. What does this mean boys and girls? It means that the wonderful Mr. Tynan was busy cheating on his wife right before their wedding. What a great guy - a shining example to all.
Another dumb idea - Sammy "taking a stand" against Toliver's "biggest firecracker" - the bon fire to burn a bunch of rock records - but the bonfire was not Tolliver's idea, it was REv. Pruitt's and the fact that the firecrackers went off was an accident.
Tolliver himself came off more as the eternal optimistic/in perpetual denial type person, as opposed to a truly bad person. When he found out that he had just bought a large piece of swamp land, he did look a bit bummed, but then he brightened and said - maybe there's oil. When he's told he's to spend 2 years in prison, he initialy looks crushed but then brightens up to say that the judge is just doing his job and that with good time he could do the time standing on one leg.
And in the end, when he finds out that he's not the oldest Tynan child, he only looks very downcast. We don't see it but I suspect that he eventually thought of something optimistic out of all of this as well. In fact, the character played by Tom Skerritt looked more evil then Tollie, with his self-righteous smug smirk on his face.
Now, in the book, Tolliver Tynan was an evil troll. The comment by Lucille in the book was that he was a nice looking kid but he was off center somehow. Even Sammy admitted that Tolliver "got his" through events and circumstances not necessarily of his creation and that Sammy himself was not exactly on the 'up and up'. So something got very, very lost in the translation from book to screen. Too bad.