Routine Pleasures (1986) dir. Jean Pierre Gorin

Routine Pleasures makes of its investigation of men and imagination in 1980s America a smallscale epic, in Gorins words, a remake of Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939). Gorins principal subject is a group of model train enthusiasts who meet weekly at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in Southern California: their miniature landscapes preserve a lost, perhaps illusory America, and their obsession curiously entwines work and childhood. Gorin weaves this subject with another: his friend and mentor Manny Farber. Farber doesnt appear, except in photographs; but his paintings and words (and such preoccupations as Jimmy Cagney) do; and Gorin, again assuming the persona of bemused investigator, shuttles between these strands with effortless ingenuity. The films intersecting narratives function like the crossing tracks of the train set, or the lines of force of Farbers paintings, establishing nodes of resemblance and resonance; and all the while Gorin assesses American identity