Let's be realistic.

Great Film overall

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

"Main Street" is a terrific little 94 minute Independent movie from Magnolia Pictures. It was released in 2010 by Magnetic Releasing, just a couple of years after the story was written by Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird). In my opinion, this film rates with the best that this writer and any of these actors have ever done. The characters are well developed, yet the performances are subtle, and if anything understated, as fits with the reserved people who inhabit the small cities of the southern United States. If you think Los Angeles and New York City are the "real world", you probably don't deserve this movie.

Watched this by pure coincidence on telly and got hooked by the awesome performance of everyone involved in this film. Story is about a decaying and nearly dead city which is suffocating its citizens. Younger people see their dreams and ambitions smashed by the lack of opportunities, middle aged people are stuck with their problems and older people long for the prosperous days when they were proud and purposeful and could live a decent life. A charismatic but very controversial businessman suddenly arrives. He carries a hazardous load. People find themselves in a painful dilemma. Should they take their risks and embrace change, or should they keep repeating their old routines that are so familiar but also hopeless and frustrating.I really cannot understand how people are not able to relate to this story, I a mean this is probably a situation every single person who has lived on earth has come across once in their lifetime. Acting is solid and captivating. I don't get you people who voted 4.7 out of 10. What is wrong with you??

As others have indicated, this was an amazing ensemble cast wasted by a truly poor script. But, I think the biggest issue here is the outdatedness of the issues identified. In the world of 2010 United States several factors are just wrong in this film. I am wondering if Horton Foote actually wrote this script in the 1970's or 80's when the issue of Hazardous Waste was front and center. Yes, we still have concerns, but the use of nuclear energy is almost a given in our day and age. We rarely hear of hazardous waste spills, as the technology has so improved. We recognize that the risks often outweigh the benefits of a cleaner environment, but it is our reality until we can effectively convert to wind or solar energy to a large scale. The public demand, although present, just is not strong enough to get this job done. Therefore, hazardous waste is simply a fact of life today. In this script, I find Gus's fears of a spill far from believable, and cannot imagine him acting in the way presented.In addition, Mary's issues as a woman are truly outdated. First, we are no longer the mobile society we once were. People do not just leave to find work in other cities. A woman like Mary would be much more inclined, in today's world, to stay in her home town and become an entrepreneur. Women do have more options today. Also, losing her job for not sleeping with the partner at the law firm is just so passé. In our world of diversity training and liability, Mary would win hands down in a lawsuit. In Main Street no one even blinks when she is fired for being unhappy about sexual harassment. Give me a break!! And, as for her calling Harris a potential loser, $30,000 as income for an entry level cop doesn't sound really all that bad! And, if Harris is planning to become an attorney in the Raleigh/Durham area, it sounds like he has a very good future. Mary's leaving, therefore, is questionable! Bottom line for me, although I agree the script was pretty boring, I can imagine actors very interested in one written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author. But, watching this film, I felt like I was watching one of the preachy films of the 70's or 80's. It's biggest sin being it's irrelevance.

I gather that Horton Foote chose Durham, N.C., as the setting for his MAIN STREET screenplay because of its symbolic value as a city that has undergone substantial changes in its economy in the past half-century, and he wanted to write about people trying to deal with change being imposed on them. I am not going to comment on the overall quality of the film here, except to say that, given the anemic screenplay, the reputable cast seems flat and largely listless, as if they realized once the shooting started just how bad the script was.No, what I want to address is the portrayal of my hometown, to which I chose to move and in which I have lived for the past twenty-five years. At the risk of sounding like Joe the Civic Booster, the city of Durham portrayed in MAIN STREET bears only faint, surface resemblance to the actual place. Anyone who manages to sit through this movie should NOT think they've learned much about the actual Durham. For one thing, Durham is not a small town but a city of more than 200,000 residents, part of a larger metropolitan area (Wake, Durham, and Orange counties) exceeding 2 million.Yes, downtown Durham is struggling. It was struggling before the Great Recession and it continues to struggle with reinvigorating itself as a vital city center. It needs more retail businesses, more reasons for the suburban middle-class to come downtown and enjoy the urban ambiance. In that respect, it's hardly alone among U.S. cities, small and large. Other parts of Durham – notably, the older working class neighborhoods within a mile or so of downtown – also are hurting.The downtown area is only part of the city. Moreover, downtown Durham has snapped back in the past few years. At least as far back as the early 1980s, old tobacco industry structures in the inner city were being rehabbed. Durham held its last tobacco market (where farmers would auction off their crop) in 1986, and the huge American Tobacco complex closed the following year. By 2001, the last cigarette plant in the city (Liggett Group) had gone. In the past decade, despite a slow start and the general downturn of the U.S. economy, many downtown buildings have been renovated and repurposed as residential, office, and retail spaces, or are in the process. The old tobacco warehouse district has become the Durham Central Park, and there is a growing bar and restaurant scene downtown.Downtown Durham also is the site of much new construction over the past two decades, including the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the Durham Performing Arts Center, the new urban transit center and a new Durham County legal complex. There's a big, modern Marriott hotel and convention center there, too, rather than the seedy little hotel in which Gus LeRoy stayed in the film. New, privately funded construction has complemented the new public structures, as well as refurbished buildings that originated in the early 20th century and before (such as the Carolina Theater, where MAIN STREET was shown here). As I said, downtown is only part of Durham. MAIN STREET makes no mention of Durham's two thriving universities. Duke, with its world-class medical center, is the city's largest employer. N.C. Central University is regarded as a leader among the nation's historically black state universities. (Harris Parker, the cop in MAIN STREET, could have been attending NCCU's School of Law, one of six university law schools in North Carolina and the only one where a student can earn a law degree at night while working his or her day job.) The film also makes no mention of Research Triangle Park, which since the 1960s has been providing jobs for thousands of residents of Durham and other nearby counties at such employers as GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco, Merck, BASF, Intel, and the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, as well as at IBM's largest U.S. operation. The city has numerous suburban residential developments and shopping areas as well as several well-preserved old neighborhoods and commercial districts closer to downtown.Durham is well-integrated into the metropolitan area known as the Research Triangle. Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Cary, Carrboro, UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. State University are indeed nice places for Durham residents to visit -- as well as places where many of them work --and relatively easy to get to. I missed MAIN STREET when it opened in Durham, but I caught it at a theater in Cary, an easy thirty-minute drive from my Durham home.Please – I know I sound like a Chamber of Commerce flack (which I am not), but Durham is NOT some isolated urban hellhole full of desperate, blue-collar types and faded aristocrats lamenting the passing of the city's tobacco heyday and wondering where their next job is coming from. Unfortunately, there are several other small cities and towns in North Carolina that resemble the Durham of MAIN STREET, places whose former textile and furniture mills have gone overseas and left downtowns devastated, hungry for industry and development. Durham is always after new companies and more jobs as well – especially in the current economy – but, again, it only vaguely resembles the city depicted in MAIN STREET. And, believe me, if Gus LeRoy came to town proposing to truck "hazardous waste" from Louisiana to Texas via Durham (?), the public outcry would be deafening.