Diggers.

"This very particular movie has a lyrical feel for place, period, and the rhythms of a small-town community trying - and tragicomically failing - to run in place while the world around it opens its arms to creeping corporatism," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "Diggers is not a film you watch—it's a movie you live in, and when time's up you feel the same sense of loss as do these guys, who realize they have no choice but to move on."

"This minutely observed period piece, set in 1976, has the brave, mournful tone of a Bruce Springsteen song ('My Hometown,' say) set in Billy Joel territory," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Directed by Katherine Dieckmann from a screenplay by Ken Marino, who plays one of the principal characters, the film makes you contemplate the passage of time. When was it exactly that the recent past slipped into the more distant past and began to seem so poignantly out of reach?"

Updated through 4/30.

"So many political prejudices infect recent indie films that it's unusual to see one that avoids them," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "This refusal is key to the pleasures found in Diggers, the small-scale social comedy directed with almost unerring tact."

In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Crust finds it to be "one of those dialogue-heavy, character-driven films that always seem to attract good actors. Featuring Paul Rudd, Maura Tierney, Josh Hamilton and Ron Eldard, among others, it's a generally well-executed - if overly familiar - tale of a vanishing America, one where the hard-working middle class falls under the heel of a corporation that endangers its way of life."

Annie Wagner in the Stranger: "As a movie, Diggers is affable and lazy - its purpose obscured by a swarm of clichés. As a comic sketch about Frankie [Marino] and Julie [Sarah Paulson], it's great."

"It's a small movie that feels small instead of intimate," writes Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online. "Even so, it's a triumph that Diggers has made it this far, and it's worth supporting for bucking trends so completely."

Ellen McCarthy talks with Rudd and Marino for the Washington Post.

Update, 4/28: Peter Smith, writing for Nerve, finds Diggers "affectionate and sometimes funny, but unsurprising to the point of lifelessness."

Update, 4/30: IndieWIRE interviews Dieckmann.

Posted by dwhudson at April 27, 2007 12:29 PM