WYOMING

Continuing to cultivate the static side of his sensibilities, the prolific Gifford (The Sinaloa Story, 1998, etc.) here presents a road story featuring a mother and son who drive around the US for a few years, talking about life.

In the 1950s, Roy and his mom are on the road, driving up and down and around America. Roy, a typical young boy, has a lot of questions about where they're going, where they've been, and why his mom and dad aren't together anymore. As she drives, Mom tries to answer as best she can, sugar-coating the truth at times and changing the subject at others; but since theirs is a neverending journey, the questions keep coming, and eventually details of the world Roy inhabits emerge. His dad's friends, whom Roy sees on occasion when he's not driving with Mom, are quintessential noir characters, from the sleepy-eyed ex-prizefighter Buzzy Shy, who wanted a waiter to kiss his fly, to the crooked cop Phil Sharky, who let Roy play with his loaded revolver one night when Dad wasn't around. Despite exposure to this crowd, though, Roy retains his innocence, wanting only to have Mom drive them to Wyoming, where he and his dog would have plenty of room to roam—if he had a dog. But Mom never makes it to Wyoming, and she never stops driving either, not even when they learn that Roy's dad died in a Chicago hospital. Later, when Roy describes his vision of the afterlife, hell is a hole near the equator that people fall into, heaven is a place reached only by tornado, and purgatory is where people "just stay where they are, and they don't even know they're waiting." There's no doubt where he is in that scheme of things.

Short as it is, this one seems too long by far.