Coal Miner's Daughter 1980
This movie has always garnered a lot of respect, not least for Sissy Spacek, who won an Oscar for her performance as Loretta Lynn. I got the blu-ray based on that, but it took a while to get around to watching it. There have certainly been a lot of movies about musicians and this is another of those, but also kind of a defining one. Lynn’s story is really amazing, born a coal miner’s daughter in Kentucky, married at age 14, and eventually the queen of country music for many decades. It is the kind of a story that is so sappy in many ways that it would be a really bad movie if it wasn’t true. And it is as much Tommy Lee Jones' movie as it is Spacek’s. It may be the most I've ever seen Jones talk in any movie, playing Lynn’s husband, an alcoholic, womanizing wife beater. The problem with the movie is that it covers so much of Lynn’s life, but after the first half of struggles, there isn’t much more to say except that she got famous and became rich. The movie doesn’t really get into how she became so creative or what she did with her success: she gets a guitar and pretty soon is performing and writing songs. Maybe there isn’t any more to the story than that. Since I‘m not a country fan, the music doesn’t really do that much for me, but I did enjoy seeing Patsy Cline, another nice performance, this time by Beverly D'Angelo. It’s a solid movie and it tells a good story with a lot of good set pieces and solid acting, but maybe still a little underwhelming.
Written: 21 Nov 2022
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital