FARMINGTON — After years of perseverance to film the movie, “Tumbledown,” the best part of Friday’s release for screenwriter and Farmington native Desiree Van Til and her husband, Sean Mewshaw, is showing it here.

“The whole dream of this film was to bring it to Farmington,” said Mewshaw, the director. “It took so long, but Desi is an optimist and she knew … if we stick to it, we can make this movie.”

Although the movie was not filmed in Farmington as Van Til and Mewshaw wanted, it is still a love letter to the town and region, he said.

“Tumbledown” begins showing at Narrow Gauge Cinema on Friday with five shows a day, scheduled for two weeks, cinema owner John Moore said.

The couple, now living in Portland, will introduce the 7 p.m. showing Saturday, Feb. 13, with a question-and-answer session following the film, he said.

The story is based on Farmington and features some characters who resemble people in Van Til’s life as she grew up here. 

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Kenny Brechner, owner of Devaney Doak & Garrett Booksellers, is the most direct transfer from real life, Mewshaw said. Van Til worked at the local bookstore in high school.

Filmed in Massachusetts, the story’s town features a replicated DDG Booksellers store, he said.

The couple met and in Los Angeles and worked there for a time, then moved back to Maine eight years ago to raise their family and collaborate on their first work together.

It was a dream to bring Van Til’s story to life and film the movie here, Mewshaw said. “We wanted to bring the circus (of production) to town,” he said.

They did some early filming in Weld and in downtown Farmington. Some of those early shots made it into the film, he said.

It is a great community, a tightknit place, he said.  

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The project started to grow and some well-known actors became involved. But financiers wanted the rebates offered by other states to film companies, he said.

The couple came to the realization that they couldn’t finish making the film here.

The romantic comedy explores the question of what it means to live in a close-knit community after losing someone — and whether it helps or hinders getting over the loss, he said.

In the story, actress Rebecca Hall plays a woman trying to recover from losing her husband, a musician-songwriter. He died alone while hiking Tumbledown Mountain in Weld. He didn’t make it down the mountain, and it was never known what really happened, Mewshaw said.  

Jason Sudeikis plays a brash New York writer who seeks a reason for the musician’s death to include in a book he’s writing. 

The title, “Tumbledown,” comes to mean more than a mountain when “the protective walls of the couple’s personalities do come tumbling down,” Mewshaw said.

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They clash but come to love in what has been dubbed a warm, gentle, funny movie about moving on.

The film was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City and at the Maine International Film Festival in Waterville last year. Many people from Farmington attended the Waterville showing. Some of the smallest details and people they depicted from Farmington raised strong laughter, he said.

Mewshaw spoke for the couple because Van Til was ill at the time. They have two children, but consider the film a third child they gave birth to, he said. 

There were some serious talks, a few fights as they worked together but their love resolved any creative differences, he said.

“We were lucky to have the resources to make the film the way we wanted,” he said.

The hardest part was winter scenes that turned into mud-season scenes. But it tied in to the theme — the thawing and muck of working through some complicated emotions, he said.

The movie premiered Feb. 8 in New York and Los Angeles and opens nationally on Friday, Mewshaw said.

abryant@sunmediagroup.net


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