Twin, adult brothers Raymond and John Redgreeves live on barely speaking terms in the small rural Wisconsin town of Florence. Decades ago, when they were young men, their mother died and their father abruptly left the state and ceased contact with them. Raymond has made something of his life; he is Florence’s one-man police force, the father of two 13-year twin boys, and himself a widower. John is coasting through life single, in a t-shirt and ponytail, with vague dreams to make and sell furniture and boats made out of cardboard.
Out of nowhere, after all these years, Dad reappears in an Airstream trailer. Says the only place he’s been happy in life was out at the lake in his tiny sleeping cottage – which has stood padlocked and empty for decades – so he’s come back to live. He parks his Airstream and sets up a homestead in his little slice of birch woods.
Alone and using his treasured ceremonial military sword as a weed whacker to clean up the place, he stumbles and falls on the blade. ICU x-rays reveal that he’s riddled with cancer. So that’s it – Dad’s come back not to live but to die. John makes Dad a cardboard casket. His middle-aged Latina registered nurse, Ginger, urges him to live. Released from the hospital, Dad returns to the lake, with Ginger hired as a hands-on caregiver.
Under the influence of chemo and meds, Dad becomes unhinged.and proposes an ill-defined competition between Raymond and John for designation of “Most Improved Boy.” Egging each other on, they accept the terms and begin a clash for the love of their dying father. John puts his cardboard casket idea into production and they start selling like hotcakes on the web. He starts to make real money for the first time in his life, and the town fathers give him a long-dormant award for “Best New Business”. Dad is so impressed that he impulsively declares John winner of the Most Improved Boy contest.
Raymond rejects Dad’s decision, and retaliates by announcing a run for Mayor. Shifting into rah-rah patriot mode, he starts to aggressively deport the many Mexican immigrants who work in and around Florence. One of the deported Mexicans leaves an infant boy behind in the care of Ginger, her second cousin. Ginger, Dad and the boy form a late-life family out by the lake. The summer cicadas drone and the peacocks Dad has bought strut freely around the place.
The mayoral election tilts against Raymond by one vote. Meanwhile, on the night of the election, Dad dies. Enraged, Raymond steals the tiny 8’x10’ cottage with a flatbed truck and dumps it in his side yard. John goes to look; as he stands there, he sees one of his two nephews set fire to the cottage. Raymond wrongly arrests John for arson, but John keeps his mouth shut to protect his nephew.
Dad’s will leaves everything – the cottage, his bank accounts, IRAs, stock, the Airstream – to Ginger’s and her nephew, Dad’s new Best Son. Mexicans! This final slap in the face sends Raymond to the funeral home to confront Dad, who lays there on the slab, smiling eternally. Raymond beats Dad on the chest and then rushes outside into the adjoining field, unhinged and grasping for any kind of meaning he can find. His hand falls on the trunk of a sapling, and clinging to that trunk is a cicada husk, the new cicada having died half in and half out, and now frozen forever in a moment in time. Raymond breaks down and realizes that he must change and move on.
Dad’s final crackpot wish was for a Viking burial in his beloved tiny cottage, pushed out to sea in flames. Since the real cottage is already burned, Dad is cremated and John makes a replica cottage out of cardboard. Dad’s ashes are put into the cottage, it’s set on fire, and pushed into the lake by Raymond and John together.
In a brief coda set in the early autumn woods, we see that the competitive, suspicious family dynamics have been internalized and are passing forward into the lives of the 13-year old Redgreeve twins, the next generation.
Contact director Rob Conrad for a full script.
