First-time director Lee David Zlotoff, a TV veteran who is at pains to avoid identification as such, puts up a respectable semblance of serious filmmaking, for a while at least. His work here is careful and well-crafted, with fine attention to points of view, fields of view, as in the portentous entrance of the heroine at night into a small town in snowy New England, a ducked-headed figure, veiled by her scarf and lugging a single suitcase, observed by a select few of those whose lives she will shortly alter. And the trinity of excellent lead actresses go at it as though they were convinced they were doing Faulkner: Alison Elliott, the femme fatale of the underrated The Underneath, as the impossibly pure-souled manslaughter parolee, drawn to this spot on the map for the geological attraction of its pegmatite formations; Ellen Burstyn as the cookie-cutter Crusty Old Broad who runs the titular restaurant; and Marcia Gay Harden as the not-too-bright housewife who is nonetheless brighter than her condescending husband can see. The canned corniness in this portrait of rustic life, however, can be held back only so long by the pokiness of the pace. And the mysterious hermit in the woods, besides being too easy a nut to crack, is a self-conscious copy of the Boo Radley character from To Kill a Mockingbird. And the melodramatically hoked-up finale cannot be exonerated by its sudden, neck-wrenching brake in crowd-pleasingness. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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