at the risk of turning this into a dream journal

One from the middle of the night was a movie I was convinced, in brief moments of wakefulness, was an actual Coen Brothers or Frank Darabont production I'd seen. It was a dustbowl era parable about a doctor of mixed race whose industrialist father accepted his financial support but not his love. Robert Duvall played the father. There were all types of setpieces in this film: a spelling bee, a supermarket hold-up with an array of streamer-shooting tommy guns, a flood that ruined the industrialist's factories. An old man, maybe the hero's senile grandfather, opened and closed the film with the same speech, addressed to the camera, delivered at two different moments in his life. It had something to do with what he called the "buxenell vagaries of life and business. That's what this film is about."