Quaid has a genius for broadcasting conflicting impulses. His body language twists uncomfortably away from his intentions, and his smile is built on the chassis of a cringe. Married to Irene (Treme's awesome Kim Dickens), whom he clearly loves, Whipple has tawdry office trysts with Heather Graham. Is it worse that he makes money on the down-low by violating genetic patents, holding back part of his harvest and reselling the seed stock? The film, which compares Quaid's agricultural shenanigans to DVD piracy, weighs patent infringement and adultery about equally. So according to the transitive property of moral transgressions, the exchange rate for wrist watches for sale spousal betrayal is 1:1 with ripping The Avengers. When Henry, facing the dire legal consequences of his actions, invokes wistful memories of his simpler, but more impoverished, childhood, his dad smacks him down, casting the American dream as a modern, air-conditioned combine "that drives itself with GPS." Henry's primary competitor, salesman Jim Johnson, is played by Clancy Brown, here as crinkly and unctuous as Quaid. Johnson has scooped up some of Henry's big seed accounts, and his hotheaded son challenges Dean on the racetrack. Where Henry's business anxieties are visibly eating him alive, Brown is immune to the toxicity of laissez-faire agro-nomics. Business is business, and the dismaying profundity of his faith is closely aligned with Henry's dad's. "Expand or die" is the mantra Henry's father handed down, the implication being that, in farm films, someone will have to do both. The film does have its warm, beating heart. Dean's girlfriend, Cadence (Maika Monroe), is smart enough to help Henry win back a lost client and to shame the older woman with designs on her boyfriend. Monroe is charismatic, imbuing Cadence with uncynical irony and emotional depth. Cadence's ultimate unwillingness to put up with Dean's bullshit gives the film a moral compass and pretty much makes her the only character to walk away uncompromised. In one of Bahrani's few missteps, the film's title sequence suggests that the Whipples are the only family left in the United States who captures all their happy moments in anachronistic, scratchy Super-8 footage. The format creates a forced idyllic memoryscape in assertive contrast to Whipple's cutthroat capitalism, but it's an overplayed hand, badly out of place in a film that doesn't include kids in Davy Crockett hats, and an overdetermined metaphor for themes Bahrani illuminates later
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