A breakthrough role for the wholesome beauty and noble forehead of Elizabeth Reaser, as a mail-order bride advertised as Norwegian but in fact German, persona non grata in rural Minnesota in the days following the Great War. After an eye-catching supporting part in Stay and a barely noticeable supporting part in The Family Stone, the actress proves she can carry an entire movie, even much of the way in unsubtitled German, provided the movie is not too weighty. (No weightier, anyway, than the gramophone and two suitcases she lugs single-handedly into the hinterlands.) Ali Selim, the writer and director, treats it as a Simple Folk tale, quaint, square, ingenuous, uncomplicated, unshadowed, only a scudding cloud or two of small-town small-mindedness. One might wonder how it would have been rewritten by that native Minnesotan of the day, Sinclair Lewis. One suspects that Reaser could have carried her share of that, too. With Tim Guinee, Alan Cumming, John Heard, Ned Beatty, and Lois Smith. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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