The Overnighters (2014)
Directed by Jesse Moss
Desperate, broken men chase their dreams and run from their demons in the North Dakota oil fields. A local Pastor's decision to help them has extraordinary and unexpected consequences.
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What critics compared The Overnighters to
Amid all these layers is a beautifully complex character portrait of Reinke, and as the film intensifies its focus on the preacher, it ventures from very good into masterpiece territory, evoking thoughts of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”
A scenario with present-day echoes of “The Grapes of Wrath” yields perceptive insights into the way we view outsiders.
***½ A prize-winner at numerous film festivals last year (including Sundance), director Jesse Moss’ gripping documentary has been described as a 21st-century “The Grapes of Wrath,” but its plot twists are of the type that might have caused Tom Joad to hightail it back to Oklahoma: Some of the job-seeking migrants depicted here prove to be meth addicts and convicted sex offenders, revelations that tax the patience of progressive pastor Jay Reinke, a Lutheran minister who has opened his heart and his church to the homeless men pouring into Williston, North Dakota, in search of jobs in the expanding “fracking” fields.