- DAVE TOSTI-LANE
- Our Town: Anastasia Higham as Emily, gazing up from the grave at the life she didn’t appreciate.
When I was younger and arguably stupider than I am now, I dismissed Our Town as feeble, sentimental mush. Its depiction of a fake, nostalgic past without greed or bigotry or cruelty of any kind seemed almost criminal—the town of Grover’s Corners is so innocent and upstanding, it makes Lake Wobegon look like a pack of Wall Street wolves on vacation in Amsterdam. Though I hadn’t read him yet, I would’ve agreed with critic George Stephens, who wrote in 1959 that Americans only enjoy gazing through Our Town‘s “mist of gentle, romantic nostalgia” because it shows them a vision of life that “some people believe or like to think existed.”
