The filmmaker and actor Mickey Reece is an uncommonly prolific microbudget filmmaker, having cranked out over two dozen features since the early 2000s. “Country Gold,” his latest picture, is a not fully baked — or, in a certain sense, an over-baked — shaggy dog tale. Despite its homegrown surrealist touches, it’s ultimately a wheel-spinning exercise, though perhaps with its own odd integrity.
Reece plays a slack-jawed country singer, Troyal Brux, pronounced Brooks: a fictional megastar based on a genuine one. Why a filmmaker would go to the trouble of slagging Garth Brooks (born Troyal Garth Brooks), whose days of stampeding the zeitgeist are long past, in the year 2023 is beyond me.
Reece, like Brooks, is from Oklahoma, which may explain a longstanding grudge of sorts. In any event, in this story, Troyal gets a letter from the older country-western singing maestro George Jones (played by Ben Hall, who has practically no resemblance to Jones), inviting Troyal to Nashville for a meeting of the minds and night on the town.
This movie’s George Jones is a labored contrivance. The real Jones has been described by the podcaster Tyler Mahan Coe as “a haunted house of a human being.” Here, Jones is an unusually voluble, quasi-avuncular figure who takes Troyal on a medium-wild night featuring booze, cocaine and massage.
Shot mostly in black-and-white, with amusing bits of animation included (the scene in which Troyal is upbraided for ordering a steak well-done is a quirky comedic highlight), this movie gets better the more it strays from its real-life models and into hazy hallucinatory American weirdness. But the snotty dismissiveness with which it treats country music ultimately overwhelms its intriguing qualities.
Country Gold
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Fandor.
