Big Bad Love

Based on the acclaimed short-story collection by celebrated Mississippi writer Larry Brown, Big Bad Love is the directing debut of actor Arliss Howard. From a script by Howard and his brother James, it is a tale of Vietnam veteran and writer Leon Barlow struggling to make fiction from his past, his dreams and the dim sound of the future bearing down on him. In the North Mississippi hill country, Barlow struggles to balance his need to create with what he has created; an ex-wife who followed him from the rehabilitation ward of a Northern Hospital, a son on the verge of adolescence, a small daughter with an incurable illness, a war buddy and best friend puzzling over his own consuming love for a funeral home heiress, and a mother who sees in her son the return and demise of her beloved husband all over again. « I am interested in what it takes to make a thing » says Howard, « a chair, a soufflé, a poem, a bridge. They seem to exist out of a certain restlessness, an irrefutable drive to put something where nothing was before. I am interested in the past, in dreams and the myth of the present as being a separate place. And trains. »