Review of At Any Price (2012) by Walter M — 16 Aug 2015

Some people take their sons to a ballgame or fishing. Henry Whipple(Dennis Quaid), a farmer and seed salesman, takes his son Dean(Zac Efron) to a funeral. His intention is not to pay his respects so much as to buy the deceased's land for his other son who is currently touring Argentina and according to Henry should be back any time now. At first, it goes over as badly as you'd expect, until it turns out that the family does really want to sell. In any case, Dean does not care about being passed over, as he has other things on his mind.

Even though his budgets are increasing and he moves further geographically away from his filmmaking origins, director Ramin Bahrani cannot escape the fact that he might be repeating himself with his obsession with dreamers. In the case of "At Any Price," it involves Dean's dreams of big time auto racing which Bahrani tries to place in a sort of American pastoral. But with a minimal story, he does not display the requisite skill here or get the performances to fully realize it.(Like most movies, there is not enough Clancy Brown to go around.) And maybe genetically modified seeds are a real issue. I'll wait until John Oliver tackles the subject before deciding for sure.