“Off the Map” (2003), starring Joan Allen, Sam Elliott, J. K. Simmons, Jim True-Frost and Valentina de Angelis, directed by Campbell Scott, screenplay by Joan Ackermann, based on her play of the same name. Filming locations in New Mexico include the junction of US 285 and NM 567 in Taos, Albuquerque, Carson National Forest and San Cristobal.

Warning: Rated PG-13 for brief scene of nudity.

While some viewers may think this film is slow-moving, the fact that it is based on a play allows the relationships among the characters to unfold. But as a play, it could never achieve the intensity of the landscape the movie captures. As such, this film is perhaps one of the truest embodiments of New Mexico since “Lonely Are the Brave.”

Jim True-Frost plays the IRS agent William Gibbs tasked with auditing a family living “off the map” in rural northern New Mexico in 1974. Joan Allen is Arlene, a free spirit grounded by the garden she tends and her precocious 11-year old daughter, Bo who stays in contact with the outside world by sending letters to large corporations with fictitious complaints with the very real expectation that they will send her free gifts as compensation. The patriarch, Charley, father and husband, is almost catatonic in his depression, a condition that Gibbs recognizes in himself as well as the equally taboo realization that he is falling in love with Arlene; a situation that both men acknowledge but can do nothing about as Gibbs abandons his original mission and moves in.

The characters are so well drawn and acted and their unpredictability adds to the film’s vérité. The story is seen through the eyes of a child and, as such, makes it a coming-of-age tale, but one that touches on the growing of all involved. It chronicles the lives of hippies living off the land but, here, the land gives back and is a character in-and-of-itself, a magical place that can be as beautiful as it is cruel, as real as it is dream-like, a place of escape and escaping away from in a movie that is understated yet powerful in its perception of people and place.