“The earth is what we all have in common,” wrote Wendell Berry, the prolific American Christian writer and farmer. The earth supports us, feeds us, shapes us: it is our literal common ground. For Buck (Craig T. Nelson), a fourth-generation dairy farmer, and his granddaughter, aspiring musician Jenny (Madison Lawlor), that common ground is rural Wisconsin. It’s a beautiful but hard land, a place so cold that the Port-o-Potties steam. Jenny dreams of leaving to pursue her dreams, but to her grandfather their home is “the Garden of Eden.”
Buck and Jenny share another area of common ground: their love for the Green Bay Packers (“the Pack”). Threatened with foreclosure, Buck makes a daring (or desperate) wager: If the Packers win the Super Bowl, they get another year to pay back their loan. Jenny supports him, but wrestles with whether she will be a part of the farm’s future—especially when she meets Billy (Brandon Sklenar), a country music star who could make her dreams a reality.
At this point, perhaps you’re imagining that “Green and Gold”—a new film directed by Anders Lindwall and written by Mr. Lindwall, Missy Mareau Garcia, Michael Graf and Steven Shafer— is just the latest in a genre of blandly inspirational sports dramas. But “Green and Gold” is quieter, richer and more potent than that. At heart it’s a study of relationships: within families, within communities, and between humanity and the natural world.
I chose that Wendell Berry quote at the beginning intentionally: the film is suffused with his writing and thought, which already sets it apart from other films in the genre. Speaking with America, Mr. Lindwall credited Berry as his biggest influence, one that he discovered only after he and his brother Davin Lindwayy (who produced the film) left home in rural Wisconsin for the lights and promise of Los Angeles. Their grandfather was a dairy farmer, their family history deeply rooted in the soil. Like Jenny, they dreamed of something more; but reading Berry’s work inspired a new appreciation for the life they left. “He gave words and language to feelings I started to have after I had left, for the affection for the community that I grew up in, the people that I grew up with,” Anders Lindwall said, calling Berry “a voice of prophecy for our generation.”
“Green and Gold” is successful not only because it’s a vehicle for interesting ideas, but because it artfully translates them into cinema. The cinematographer Russ Fraser gorgeously photographs the Wisconsin countryside, capturing the moods of season and weather, the texture of the land and the work. He shoots the actors and environments in auras of golden sunlight, evoking the sacred of the everyday.
The performances rely as much on the actors’ silences as their line deliveries. Nelson is reliably gruff, but through expression and gesture he conveys that Buck is a man of deep love. Lawlor gives an incredibly charismatic performance, balancing Jenny’s confidence and fire with a quiet gravity.
I’ll admit that I am always a little leery of “faith-based” films, but found “Green and Gold”’s portrayal of faith refreshingly authentic. There are scenes set at church (Buck’s wife Margaret, played by Annabel Armour, makes sure the family attends services), but more often the sacred appears in small moments of connection, and ultimately the support the family receives from their community.
“We wanted it to feel super authentic to ourselves and to the place we grew up and how we were raised,” Anders Lindwall said. “Our parents, they didn’t really talk about their faith that much….It was more these acts that they would do that we got to observe. So we drew on that a lot and we tried…to let the actions of our characters and their experiences with the natural world and their environment speak to spirituality.”
Davin Anders added: “I’m much more interested in the fruit of someone’s life, how they spend their time, what they care about, and how they live. We wanted to make a film that had goodness, truth, and beauty in it, so it was just like: Let the characters be that.”
As uncomfortable as Buck and Jenny look in the pews, it becomes clear (to us if not them) that they are deeply spiritual. This is especially true in the ways that they practice stewardship: Buck of the farm, Jenny of her art. As another character observes: “There’s a holiness about how you guys care for things.” The film draws an implicit connection between caring for creation and artistic creation, the idea of nurturing and protecting the gifts that have been given to you in the face of a world that’s only interested in what it can sell.
That philosophy extended to the film’s production, which was intentionally rooted in the people and communities of northern Wisconsin. “I don’t think we fully understood how deep that connection would be and how above and beyond all of those folks would go,” Davin said. Local businesses and farms paused work for the day to accommodate filming, streets shut down, a local choir performed on the soundtrack (and were driven hours to the set by the Lindwalls’ sister). Even the film’s corporate sponsors—the restaurant chain Culver’s and the Packers—are tied to the local community. (The Packers are the only publicly owned team in the N.F.L.) This lends the film an air of affectionate authenticity: You can tell that it’s a labor of love.
Ultimately, “Green and Gold” is about paying attention to the sacred in the everyday. Late in the film there is a long shot of Jenny in a field, feeling the sunlight and the breeze in grateful silence. It’s all connected: the sun and the grass, the cows and the dirt, the hands that plow the fields and the fingers that pluck music from guitar strings. Berry wrote: “You cannot save the land apart from the people or the people apart from the land.” It’s an important, even urgent, message for our times. “Green and Gold” reminds us why.
