Best Actress: Geraldine Page

 Okay, we can all agree that this is a career Oscar, right? 

gif by me

Because Geraldine Page was delivering great performances for decades up to this point, and it took The Trip to Bountiful for the Academy to wake up a realize that they still hadn't rewarded her? (DO GLENN CLOSE NEXT, MY GOD, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?)

Not to say that The Trip to Bountiful isn't an award-worthy performance on its own, because it is. It's a heartfelt, slower film that would definitely be called Oscar bait in this day and age, but feels very of its time for the straightforward way it presents the story. 

Geraldine Page plays Carrie Watts, an elderly woman with a heart condition who wants to return to her childhood hometown of Bountiful, Texas. She's couped up in Houston with her weak-willed son, Ludie, (played effectively by John Heard) and mean-spirited daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae, (played effectively by Carlin Glynn) and has to walk on eggshells around them while squirrelling away her pension cheques to save up for a return to Bountiful. She's tried this before, see, but Ludie and Jessie Mae always catch her at the train station and bring her back to the apartment. 

The movie, of course, wouldn't exist if this wasn't the trip that succeeded, and she accomplishes it by taking the bus instead of the train. But what Carrie refuses to comprehend is that Bountiful doesn't exist anymore. It's abandoned, everyone is gone, and it's not even on the map. Even knowing that she can't get a bus directly into town doesn't deter her: she's adamant she'll hire a driver to take her in. And through every entanglement, from the sweetheart young lady also taking the bus that evening to the night station manager who listens to her stories to the sheriff who eventually takes pity on this elderly woman and her dying wish and drives her the 12 miles over to what used to be Bountiful. 

I was touched by this film the first time I watched it, and in my earlier (archived) review, I wrote, in part, "I spent the entire movie wanting to buy a car so I could drive Geraldine Page’s character to Bountiful." And not that I'm ancient nowadays, but at 38, I'm definitely in a different phase than I was back in 2014, and The Trip to Bountiful hit differently this time.

There's something beautiful and heartbreaking in the idea of your childhood and your memories being a place you can never revisit. Of being the last of a line, or of having survived long enough that you're the only memory of a place. May we all live long, happy lives, but this film really reinforces what that cost is. You can go home until you can't. You can remember until it hurts to. You can make peace with life and where it leads you. You can always be homesick.

Absolutely stellar performance from Geraldine Page. I'll never forgive the Academy for taking so long to give her an Oscar (...she says, knowing she wouldn't swap out the actual winners from the years she was nominated).

Geraldine was nominated against Anne Bancroft (Agnes of God), Whoopi Goldberg (The Color Purple), Jessica Lange (Sweet Dreams) and Meryl Streep (Out of Africa). 

I have, ashamedly, only seen Out of Africa and despite the Meryl Streep and Robert Redford of it all, I dislike that movie so much, and I really can't elaborate because it's been eons since I've seen it and I have no interest in revisiting it. The other three movies are on my watchlist, though! But I have to say, I think Geraldine gets my vote.

DID I LIKE THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL? Yes! And it's free to stream on Tubi so if you haven't seen it, what are you waiting for?!

__

Did you like The Trip to Bountiful? What are your thoughts on Geraldine Page's Oscar win?

Keep up with all my Rewatching the Best Actresses posts here!