DVD Review: “At Any Price” Thought-Provoking, Unforgettable

“At Any Price” stars Dennis Quaid as Henry and Zac Efron as Dean. Quaid is a seed farmer in Iowa and Efron is his son, who is an aspiring race car driver, hoping to make it big one day on the tracks.

It is very important for Henry to pass on the family farm to his son, who wants nothing to do with it.

Henry will do whatever it takes to hold on to his customers and be the top seed salesman.

Loyalty we find out is of high importance in Henry’s line of work. One day Henry finds out that he is being investigated because of alleged unethical practices he took with his seed business.

A man who had it all is all of a sudden feeling a lot of pressure to fix the situation, even if it means not being totally upfront.

Henry’s son Dean is facing his own pressures on the racetrack – not only to perform exceedingly well, but also to raise enough money for his races.

Henry is not at all supportive of his son’s dream, thinking that he is just wasting his time on something that will not amount to anything.

Dean’s mother on the other hand, played by Kim Dickens, is quietly supportive of her son’s racing pursuits.

Dean truly feels that racing will be his opportunity to get away from his small town, where there is not much for people to do – farming being the main livelihood.

The movie’s exploration of family and loyalty is really well done and it offers no easy answers with the moral issues that it raises.

Near the end of the movie something unexpected occurs and it puts everything into perspective. The film takes on an almost Shakespearean quality to it as a result.

You realize that everyone will be completely changed from this incident, which has strong reverberations.

The big question that people had coming out of this movie was should he or shouldn’t he have told.

This kind of moral debating is always welcome in a movie as it gets the audience thinking about weighty matters, something that mainstream Hollywood typically avoids in its movies.

Certainly if you’re a race car enthusiast, the scenes of Dean racing will have a strong appeal, but the movie as a whole is definitely more than simply a story of farming and race car driving.

A sharply observed portrait of the American Dream, the movie is reminiscent in ways of the Arthur Miller play, “Death of a Salesman,” with Dennis Quaid more or less representing the title character – Willy Loman.

Both Quaid and Efron give terrific performances. This is even more of an achievement when you consider that neither is all that likeable, particularly Quaid’s character.

Quaid’s wife gives a subtle, understated performance that is powerful in its own way.  There is much to appreciate in this thought-provoking and unforgettable movie.