Oliver Matheson’s review published on Letterboxd:
It’s almost unfair how easy it is to get a five-star rating out of me. Films like Wrestle, Night School, and now the outstanding God’s Country are so disarmingly simple, but all it takes is a camera pointed at real people and you have a work of tremendous power.
Watching God’s Country is like watching home movies from the late seventies, but instead of a family we gain insight into an entire town. In 1979 French filmmaker Louis Malle visited the farming community of Glencoe, Minnesota to collect footage for a PBS documentary. Malle's skill at documentary filmmaking is instantly obvious, and every time he talks to someone he manages to have a transparent conversation where folks don’t mind letting their guard down, speaking about subjects you normally don’t bring up, like paychecks or the type of living you are making. It is probably safe to say that not everyone has familiarity with a farming town like this, so the fact that Malle gets his subjects to open up is of great benefit to the audience. It should be no surprise that Malle makes plenty of friends along the way.
Malle was too busy with other products to do anything with the footage, but six years later he returned to Glencoe to follow-up with his friends. Unfortunately, his follow-up occurred during the mid-eighties crisis of overproduction in farm country. I think it is fair to set expectations that this section of the film only takes place during the last fifteen minutes or so, but the juxtaposition is an experience like none other (except for probably the Up series, but I have never seen those). It is remarkable how much people can age in six years. With this comparison we not only get a time capsule of an American town in a very specific time and place. We also get an eye-opening look at the decline in America farming, all the moving because we see first-hand the optimism just six years before.
God’s Country is filled with incredible intimacy, from getting to sit in the choir loft during a wedding (A. a wedding that contains the best outfits of all time #70s B. where the choir is singing “We’ve Only Just Begun” by my girl Karen Carpenter), to sitting on the dance floor of the same wedding, to spending a few short but powerful minutes in a nursing home. It’s never hard to make assumptions about the way certain people live or think, but films like God’s Country wash away stereotypes and allow us to see our neighbors for who they really are, even neighbors who were alive over thirty years ago.