Sunshine State. Written and directed by John Sayles. With Edie Falco, Jane Alexander, Ralph Waite, Angela Bassett, James McDaniel, Mary Alice, Bill Cobbs, Gordon Clapp, Mary Steenburgen, Timothy Hutton, Tom Wright, Miguel Ferrer, Alexander Lewis, Richard Edson, and Perry Lang. A Sony Classics release; 141 minutes. At the Avon.

Look at any daily paper and chances are you'll find a story of weirdness or catastrophe set in Florida. From the hanging chads in the presidential election to the recently reported vast and unidentifiable blob of black water drifting off the coast, the state embodies all that's extreme, banal, and essential in America. Perhaps David Lynch could do justice to this big peninsula dipping into the national subconscious. John Sayles, on the other hand, might have been better off restricting himself to the educational displays in the Epcot Center. His Sunshine State has a kind of programmatic, show-and-tell feel to it that eschews drama, deep psychology, and genuine darkness for a slate of unthreatening, politically wholesome issues. It's sunshine without heat or shadows.

He's had better luck with other states. In Limbo (1999), he distilled some of the starkness and desperation of Alaska, until the film took a narrative nutty near the end. Then there's his haunting and twisted paean to Texas, Lone Star (1996). Sunshine State, however, favors by-the-numbers agenda-driven exposés like City of Hope (1991) and Men with Guns (1997), though it's less strident and preachy. I fear Sayles's films are becoming rote exercises that get churned out regularly and are predictable in their tepid correctness, each effort being a dimmer shadow of earlier inspiration. He's the Woody Allen of leftist social-problem films, offering slogans instead of punch lines.

As is often the case with Sayles, those slogans take the form of personifications. State boasts a broad ensemble cast, but each role is more a point of view than a personality. Of course, some try harder than others to assert their individuality. Stuck on Plantation Island, a coastal backwater with no past, a dreary present, and a dark future, Edie Falco's Marly Temple is a still-trim thirtysomething whose dreams of show biz went as far as playing a mermaid in a local aquatic show. Now she bides her time tending to the fading motel of her blind, irascible father (Ralph Waite) and fending off the insistent offers from sleazy real-estate developers Lester (Miguel Ferrer) and Greg (Perry Lang). They want to transform the sleepy island into another exclusive resort community for rich, sun-seeking Northerners. Marly may be a bit shopworn, but she's the genuine article, and when she courts Jack (Timothy Hutton), the landscaper brought in by the carpetbaggers, and the two swap tequila shots and deluded dreams (his idol is Frederick Law Olmsted), you're reminded that Sayles could be one of the few filmmakers capable of creating decent women's roles.

That is, if he didn't have more important things to do, like presenting a comprehensive social, economic, and political cross-section with an all-too-transparent partisan spin. Every other scene, another special interest is heard from. There's Dr. Lloyd (Bill Cobbs), the noble leader of Lincoln Beach, the endangered black community on the island. There's Desiree (Angela Bassett), the girl once driven out of Lincoln Beach because of a teenage indiscretion; she's returning with her buppie husband. And there's Francine Pickney (Mary Steenburgen), head of the chamber of commerce and organizer of the annual island celebration, "Buccaneer Days."

The other characters make even less of an impression. Most are caricatures; Marly's redneck ex-husband (Richard Edson), who dresses up as a pirate and a Union soldier for "Buccaneer Days," is a caricature playing other caricatures. Francine's pageant suggests that Sayles might have in mind as a model Robert Altman's Nashville, with the random lives of his characters loosely orbiting an arbitrary public event. But State is both less structured than that infuriating masterpiece and more glibly organized, with perfunctory episodes put together not with the wit and grace of serendipity or free association but with the logic of note cards. By not letting any scene last more than a few minutes, Sayles foils any dramatic development -- or any development of an argument, as all the controversy ends up, literally, a dead issue.

"People don't realize how hard it is to invent a tradition," says Francine in one of the film's sprinklings of bons mots. Or how hard it is to invent a movie like the one this aspires to be, set in a fully imagined world inhabited by believable people, in a state that epitomizes the worst and the best of the other 49.

Issue Date: August 2- 8, 2002