As harvest draws near, Betty confronts a terrifying new reality and will go to desperate lengths to save her family when they are threatened with being forced from their land. An old friend, struggling to keep his own farm profitable by any means necessary-offers Betty a way out. She refuses to get involved, but as the pressures mount for her family and they are on the brink of eviction, her husband, Frank, reveals that he is seriously ill.
This isn't a perfect movie... But I can say without hesitation that if you want to be able to say you were there when a great American filmmaker's career kicked off, you need to see Runoff.
Truly, Runoff can be an uncomfortable film to watch -- both because Levin's subject matter is supposed to make us uncomfortable and because her film leaves so much untended, is in the end so uneven.
The movie achieves an understated resonance through Levin's emotionally sensitive compositions and her clued-in portrayal of life in a middle-American farming community.
The 90-minute movie is a tightly compressed exploration of forces that make it next to impossible to operate a small business when a voracious corporation moves in for the kill.
Even when Levin's symbolism is a little on the nose, these elements are balanced with enough small details and moments that they blend in to the larger texture of the characters' lives.
Intelligent and entertaining, Runoff moves its audience from what was perhaps a vague, wistful notion of the rural existence of family farming to witness the harsh realities of a tragically disappearing American way of life
A little too reluctant to take a stand against chemicals but worth seeing for its empathy for its main character who is forced to carry out a crime that puts her in league with Monsanto.
