ACCIDENTAL TEXAN - Mark Reviews Movies

Accidental Texan, Roadside Attractions

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | March 7, 2024

To its credit, Accidental Texan doesn't take the obvious route one might expect from its setup. A Harvard-educated, Los Angeles-based actor finds himself stranded in the middle of Texas, in a small town where everybody knows everyone else, has a particular way of doing things, and doesn't pay much or any mind to the dealings of the world beyond their little slice of it. When this outsider arrives, we might anticipate that he'll become the target of much derision, the butt of many jokes, and the receiver of a fine lesson about how his fancy education, his career ambitions, and his big-city way of life aren't a big deal.

To be sure, Erwin Vandeveer (Rudy Pankow) is mocked and joshed a bit before learning an important lesson about his own life. The slightly refreshing thing, though, about Julie B. Denny's screenplay (based on the novel Chocolate Lizards by Cole Thompson) is that the locals need him as much as he ultimately realizes he needs them and their down-home way of life to figure out something about himself. The movie starts as a fish-out-of-water comedy but gradually transforms into a tale about mutual respect between two men who seem to be polar opposites, because that's exactly what they are.

The other guy is Merle (Thomas Haden Church, in a nicely lived-in performance), a lifelong oil driller whose destiny was pretty much determined as soon as his grandfather started making a living in the business. What else was he going to do? We learn Merle dropped out of the education system right before high school, started working for his father, and hasn't thought about much of anything besides oil since then. He once had a wife, who divorced him, and a son, who died, so now, he really has nothing and nobody apart from his business. It's in trouble, too.

Before learning any of that, though, we follow Erwin on what could be the big break for his struggling career—starring in a legitimate movie being made at a studio in New Orleans. Through an elaborate string of avoidable things—involving sensitive pyrotechnics and a cellphone that nobody notices somehow—going wrong, Erwin is fired and has to make the long, shameful drive back to California. Along the way, his agent drops him, and his car breaks down in a random field.

At the local diner in the town of Buffalo Gap, Merle overhears Erwin's plight and offers to tow his car to the auto shop. He'll do it on one condition: Erwin has to help him an errand, which turns out to be putting chickens into the car of a banker looking to take down his company, and join him at his company's latest drill site. As it turns out, he has a much bigger scheme in mind for the stranded young man.

Here's where things start down that pleasant path and, unfortunately, become a bit too convoluted and niche for the simple material's own good. Merle wants Erwin to pretend to be his company's new highly educated and very skilled land man. The fact that Denny and director Mark Bristol kind of breeze by what a land man is and why the deception is even necessary for the success of Merle's plan isn't a solid start to a plot that ends up revolving around those specific elements.

Basically, the bank is about to take over Merle's beleaguered business unless he can find and strike oil in the next 30 days. He has a general idea about the location of a sizeable deposit of the stuff, but the bank's representatives are making deals with the landowners before he can even ask for permission to drill. For some reason, Merle needs to Erwin to keep up his role, do the actual job of a specialty about which he knows nothing, and even help him sell the idea of drilling to those landowners (Bruce Dern plays their last chance, and Carrie-Anne Moss plays the diner server who introduces them—and whom Merle quite fancies).

None of this makes much of any sense. It seems far too elaborate and untrustworthy a scheme, especially when Merle attempts some corporate espionage with a forged football, and if there's any rationale for the whole thing depending on Erwin's ability to simultaneously be a fake and in-practice land man, it's lost amidst the constant introduction of barriers to and complications in the plan.

Far more effective is what happens between that plotting. Key to that element is the relationship between Erwin, who has a troubled relationship with a father who's skeptical of his dream, and Merle, whose family business is all he has ever had and who is now missing the family part of it entirely. In some quieter moments, the two talk about these gaps in their lives and come to understand each other on a level that's a bit affecting by the time all the other stuff is said and done.

All that other stuff, though, becomes the bigger point of Accidental Texan. It's neither convincing on its own nor nearly as compelling as the human story on the sidelines.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Book

Buy the Book (Kindle Edition)