You don't have to be a baby boomer to love The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio, but it couldn't hurt. This is an engaging film about a real family and about optimism in the midst of hardship, but it's also a fascinating historical document.
Set in the 1950s, The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio is about America in a particular moment -- just prior to mass marketing and conspicuous consumption and the oncoming avalanche of possessions and merchandise and stuff that now buries us all.
(Believe it or not, The Gap did not yet exist. Truly. Ask your grandparents.)
In that time, Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore) was a wife and mother raising 10 children. Her husband Kelly (Woody Harrelson) was a factory worker and an alcoholic; not much of his paycheque made it home.
To help with household finances, Evelyn entered dozens of contests put on by various corporations and advertisers. A winning jingle or limerick could bring home appliances, electronic gadgets, toys or cash, and Evelyn Ryan often won such contests. She turned the prizes into cash and put the money into groceries and other necessities.
The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio is structured around her "contesting" but the film is mostly about Evelyn's abilities as a mother and a writer and her outstanding capacity for joy. She is presented as a woman fully enagaged in her own life, interested in the wider world but happy with her children and her everyday chores and the intellectual outlet that the contests allowed her. She worked endlessly to broaden her children's horizons and seemed to see clearly their chance for a larger life than her own.
Evelyn had to manage in the face of her husband's drinking and with the constant shortage of household funds, but those were only the obvious challenges. She also dealt with the isolation of her at-home life and with a pre-feminist social structure that meant her contest winnings were a source of shame for her husband.
Writer/director Jane Anderson uses some pretty visual tricks to keep The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio from slipping into "Queen For A Day" weeper territory. In the role of Evelyn, Moore fair leaps off the screen, and in fact turns to address the camera when it's time to explain her life and the workings of the contests she enters -- a pleasant imitation of the advertising techniques of the day.
Despite all the children in the household, The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio concentrates mostly on two characters. As the husband disappointed in his life, Woody Harrelson has a very complex role to play, and he plays it superbly. Moore's performance, however, carries the picture. She makes Evelyn's optimism totally believable and without a scintilla of the Pollyanna to it.
In this role, Moore is the face of hope; anyone could use 90 minutes of that.
BOTTOM LINE
The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio is the sort of film that may prompt you to rush out and buy the book upon which it's based. That would be the bestselling memoir of the same name written by Terry Ryan, one of Evelyn Ryan's 10 children.
(This film is rated PG)
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