Local Hero (1983)

IMDb plot summary: An American oil company has plans for a new refinery and sends someone to Scotland to buy up an entire village, but things don't go as expected.

Directed by Bill Forsyth. Stars Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, and Fulton Mackay.

Local Hero stars Peter Riegert as a man who is sent by his oil company employer to a small town in Scotland, where he is offering to purchase all the land from them and is sent there to negotiate a price. The people are excited and ready to sell, but they want to negotiate a higher price, and so they keep him around for a while. While he's there, he ends up falling in love with the village and the people there and questioning whether he wants to facilitate this sale after all. This is a very quiet, slow film. Because of that, it took me a while to register the kind of story that I was seeing. It didn't hit the traditional hallmarks or beats I expected, which is a good thing on one hand because it was outside of the box, but on the other hand it meant that it took me a long time to get settled into the story and to figure out whether I was meant to look at our protagonist as a hero or a villain. It took me a long time to get emotionally invested in the story. If I went back and re-watched it, knowing what kind of vibe it was going for, it might be a much easier sell and a much quicker investment in the characters. There are so many different characters being shown to us that I can't process all of their plot lines on a first watch, so I do feel like one viewing doesn't give me the full picture of it. But after one viewing I wasn't sold on it the way I hoped I would be.

🎥 Local Hero (1983)

📊 Ranked #2307/4212 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 45

lost to Phantom of the Opera (held at #2140)

beat The Forger (#3184 → #3185)

beat Easy Virtue (#2661 → #2662)

beat Neighbors (#2401 → #2402)

lost to Waves (held at #2268)

beat The Last Temptation of Christ (#2335 → #2336)

lost to Holiday Affair (held at #2302)

beat The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (#2318 → #2319)

beat A Complete Unknown (#2310 → #2311)

lost to Malignant (held at #2306)

beat Just Like Heaven (#2308 → #2309)