Good morning.
The first time I saw Local Hero (1983) was in December 2021.
Every year around Christmas, my girlfriend would go home to Austin to stay with her family for about two weeks. And then, depending on the year, I would either go down there to join her for New Year’s or she would come back to New York.
During her time away, I would lay out a schedule of movies to watch that I’d saved up because I knew she’d never want to watch them. Or, at the very least, that it would take her a long time to watch with me, far longer than I could ever wait.
December 2021 was unique because I was in between jobs at Artsy and Conde Nast. I had made sure I got a month of time off. Because I had so much free time, I was able to program out a very rigorous schedule of watching two movies a day while my girlfriend was away.
I’m not sure where I got the idea to watch Local Hero. It was probably from one of my patented Google searches like: “best good time movies” or “movies like Diner.” But I was so lucky to have found it because it has become one of my absolute favorite movies.
Local Hero was written and directed by the Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth. The plot of the movie is something like this: A yuppie-ish businessman known as MacIntyre (or Mac for short) works at the Knox Oil corporation in Houston. Mac is sent by his boss, Mr. Happer, to Scotland to buy out an entire town, called Ferness, so that the company can set up offshore drilling. Happer also wants him to watch the sky for astronomical activity. MacIntyre is sent because everyone thinks he’s Scottish, but he’s actually Hungarian. When Mac arrives in Ferness, he’s all business. But slowly he becomes enamored with the town and the people in it. Still, he presses to get the deal done, feeling slightly bad about it the whole time, even though the people of Ferness are very excited about the prospect of becoming rich. I won’t spoil the ending, but the deal goes sideways thanks to an old man named Ben who lives in a one room shack on the beach and survives by collecting washed up items that come on the shore.
From that brief description, you might be able to guess why I love this movie so much: the plot is low stakes, the movie mainly involves people hanging out and drinking, there are lots of subtle jokes based in wordplay, the majority of the scenes take place on or looking out on beautiful northern beaches, and the general theme of the movie is, “what am I doing with my life and am I happy?” Oh, and Mark Knopfler did the score for the movie including writing the incredible “Victor’s Song”.
The first time I saw the movie, I was very drawn to the idea of a man who feels more at home with himself when, by circumstance, he is able to finally be present with his surroundings. In the case of the movie, it takes Mac being stuck in Ferness until he can finish the deal for him to realize he doesn’t really like what he does, the objects he owns, or the place he lives.
At one point, Mac gets drunk and tries to convince a character named Gordon Urquhart (the town’s innkeeper and accountant) that they should switch lives—one of the reasons is because Mac is in love with Gordon’s wife, Stella. (The “Mac is in love with Stella” side plot is so oddly subtle as to be nearly nonexistent, but it somehow works). “I’ll make a good Gordon, Gordon,” Mac says. Thanks to the YouTube user “qarnos” and their “Moments from Local Hero” series of uploads you can watch that scene and a few others.
I’ve seen Local Hero four times now. The most recent was on the plane from New York to Italy. When I sat down and fired up my Delta in-flight entertainment screen I couldn’t believe my eyes! Local Hero? On a transatlantic flight? What were the odds?
On this most recent viewing, what stuck out to me was all the jokes about money and finances. In the scene where Mac tries to switch lives with Gordon, one of the perks he dangles is the fact that he makes “$80,000” per year. “Plus,” Mac continues, “I have over $50,000 in mixed securities.”
That’s just one of many examples. Earlier in the movie, Mac is talking with a few of the townspeople who are showing him some lobsters they’ve just caught. “What do you do with the lobsters?” Mac asks. “They catch a plane,” a fisherman says. “Next day, they’re being eaten in London or Paris. They see the world.” And so Mac asks. “Do you eat them?” To which the fisherman says: “Oh, no. Too expensive.”
Later when the Russian fishing boat captain and friend of the people in Ferness, Victor, arrives in town, he and Gordon have the following exchange at the bar.
“I left last year's money on short-term deposit,” Gordon says. “I didn’t know when you might need it.” Victor asks him: “Wouldn’t it work harder on the money market?” Gordon shakes his head. “The amounts don’t justify it. Besides, the dollar’s all over the place now. It’s a full-time job just monitoring it.” Victor looks down at a piece of paper and nods. “No, I see what you mean.” Then Gordon says to him: “You should think again about some property. I’ll be liquid after this Knox thing. Come in with me.” And Victor finally responds, “You know I’m a cash man, Gordon. I'll have to think about it.”
During the party scene, or cèilidh, that is Local Hero’s standout set piece. There are several brilliantly written exchanges about money that serve not only as jokes but as little snapshots into life and the relationship people have with money. First, there is this exchange between two Ferness residents.
“Four generations of working that farm, digging and draining and planting. Years and years, and it comes to this.”
“Strange times, Archie. What was it Gordon Urquhart offered you?”
“1.5 million in cash, plus 2% of the relocation fund, and a share in the oil field revenue.”
“Aye, strange times. Strange times.”
Then, there is a moment where Gordon and Mac are negotiating over the final deal for Knox Oil to buy the town of Ferness.
“Come on, what do you say?”
“What do I say what?”
“Let’s haggle.”
“Haggle? Dollars or pounds? The 2,000 per, or the 10 million?”
“Pounds. Let's say pounds. Come on, Mac. Negotiate!”
“Whatever you want, Gordon. Pounds, yen, rubles. You name it.”
That is followed by another scene where two Ferness locals are discussing their newfound wealth.
“Well, Edward, I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.”
“Aye, but Peter, I thought all this money would make me feel...different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, all it’s done is make me feel depressed. I don’t feel any different.”
“Well, Edward, you'll just need to buck up. You need to accept the fact you’re stinking rich. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy to be a millionaire, Ed.”
Near the end of the film, when Mac is trying to buy out Ben, the man who lives in a shack on the beach, he offers him half a million pounds and then lays out some postcards of different beaches around the world out on a table. “Look at this—Hawaii. I can get you five or six miles of Hawaii.” Riegert delivers the line perfectly: Hawaii’s coastline becomes just another commodity, a thing to be used to bargain.
But Ben responds by picking up a fistful of sand and asking Mac if he’ll give him a pound note for every grain of sand in his hand. Mac declines the offer. “Oh, dear, oh, dear. You could have had a very nice purchase, Mr. MacIntyre. I can't hold much more than 10,000 grains of sand in my hand at a time. Did you think it would be a bigger number?”
Now that I’ve written out about a quarter of the screenplay, I find it ridiculous that I didn’t fully pick up on all of the different ways money and finances are brought up throughout Local Hero every other time I watched it. Each character is somewhat defined by their relationship to money. Ben the beachcomber doesn’t need it. Victor the Russian fisherman likes to keep his money in cash and he encourages Mac at one point that he is doing the right thing by buying Ferness for Knox Oil. “You can’t eat scenery,” he tells him. Gordon sees an opportunity to get rich (“We won’t have anywhere to call home, but we’ll be stinkin’ rich”) and wants to take it. Mac has something resembling fondness for the status his upper middle class job, money, and personal objects give him, but senses there might be something hollow about it all—and yet he still wants to do his job and complete the deal.
What makes Local Hero a great film (among many things) is that the movie itself doesn’t, I think, make a claim that any one relationship to money is better than the others. It doesn’t portray any character in a negative light—they are all just relative to each other.
As someone approaching 40 and who has been in solidly upper or middle management jobs for about eight years now, I can relate to Mac. There is comfort in having money and being able to afford things. I know I need money to buy a home. I know I need money to support a family. I know I need money to die with dignity in America. I want to make money to do all of those things and to live a comfortable life. But I also know that no amount of money is ever enough. So then what will be enough? I’ve climbed the ladder to a certain point—and I know I’ll keep climbing, but up to what rung? And why?
Local Hero doesn’t want to answer any of those questions for you. And that’s probably why I love it. All it does is show you people living lives. Sure, the movie is also irreverent and quirky (I haven’t even discussed the subplot where Mr. Happer pays money to have a man verbally harass him, the character Marina who has webbed feet, or any of the astronomy stuff) but it all feels real. When the camera fades on Mac back at his apartment in Houston looking out from his balcony on the city, you are left feeling something. And all of a sudden you feel compelled to write almost 2,000 words about Local Hero or, at the very least, watch it all over again.