At Any Price

At Any Price 88 Cast: Dennis Quaid, Zac Efron, Kim Dickens, Heather Graham, Clancy Brown, Red West Director: Ramin Bahrani Rating: R, for sexual content including a strong graphic image, and for language Running time: 105 minutes

Ramin Bahrani is one of the most intriguing filmmakers working today, and heretofore his work has forced its way into some fairly obscure corners of the American experience. He immersively explored the fatalistic worlds of a pushcart operator from Pakistan in 2005’s Man Push Cart, a teenage Hispanic orphan hustling a living in Queens in 2007’s Chop Shop and a Senegalese taxi driver keeping vigil over an apparently suicidal man in Winston-Salem, N.C., in 2009’s Goodbye Solo. Now he has trained his focus on the American heartland, onto a father and son living in Iowa.

The father, Henry Whipple (Dennis Quaid), is a sales rep for the Liberty Seed Co. as well as the head of operations for his family’s farm, a concern he hopes to pass on to one ofhis two sons, neither of whom seems much interested in agriculture. Grant (Patrick W. Stevens), the older of the two (and Henry’s favorite), has run off to South America and is out of the picture, so Henry’s hopes rest on Dean (Zac Efron), a rebellious sort whose ambition is to be a stock car racer. Dean can’t wait to get away from the farm - and his father, who’s less the noble yeoman than an unctuoushuckster, desperate to retain his client base in the face of mounting competition.

This leads Henry to cut some corners and become involved in the illegal resale of genetically modified seeds, which lands him in trouble with his bosses at the agribusiness giant. Meanwhile he’s using every trick at his disposal to try to sell Dean on the agrarian dream. Quaid’s performance, if not quite a revelation (he has been very good before, especially in Far From Heaven), is layered and brave and free of vanity. Henry is a loser, the sort of opportunistic glad-hander that people he considers friends cross the street to avoid.

And Efron, trying hard to evolve beyond his teen idol image, looks perhaps a bit too dreamy to make a convincing farm boy, but otherwise works hard to make Dean into a real, live boy. Kim Dickens is a solid presence as the most sympathetic member of the Whipple family, and 70-yearold Red West - the former Elvis bodyguard who was riveting in Goodbye Solo - is the Whipple patriarch.

Bahrani’s films are nevereasily reducible to formulae, and At Any Price defies any sort of clean synopsis. Maybe it will suffice to say that it feels like a great American tragedy, like East of Eden or Death of a Salesman. There’s a novelistic texture to the film, and those who expect a tidy resolution may be frustrated by Bahrani’s fidelity to the way things actually work themselves out, in compromise and half-measures and moral doubt.