The Road To Galena Review: Familiar Drama Is Too Safe & Unmemorable
Movies like The Road to Galena present a challenge to film critics. The age of Rotten Tomatoes has ossified the notion that reviews are either positive or negative, but there are many films that live in a space between enthusiastic endorsement and scalding dismissal, where the customary adjectives hardly seem appropriate. They are an emotional doldrums of sorts, eliciting no reaction, whether for or against, that is strong enough to encourage more than a passing conversation. How, then, is one supposed to generate legible, even diverting prose about their viewing experience? Without simplifying the exercise by allowing the assessment communicated here to swing artificially in either direction, the best option seems to accept The Road to Galena as a safe story safely told, and highlight a few ways the movie could've made more of what it had to work with.
From writer-director Joe Hall, The Road to Galena covers decades in the life of Cole Baird (Ben Winchell), who finds himself on a lifepath he never wanted without knowing how to take himself off it. Though he dreams of owning a farm in his hometown of Galena, Maryland, marrying his high school sweetheart Elle (Aimee Teegarden) and working alongside his childhood best friend Jack (Will Brittain), his father John (Jay O. Sanders) wants him to dream bigger. A brief prelude that reveals him as a lawyer later in life, living in Washington D.C. and married to a different woman (Alisa Allapach), promises many failed attempts to return to that dream. Is he destined to live a life of nominal success that will never truly satisfy him? Or can he find his way back to Galena before it's too late?
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