Linda is a bored housewife whose husband shows no interest in her. She wants a child and is haunted by the memory of the baby she was forced to give up from a teenage pregnancy. But when a strange young man named Martin suddenly appears, claiming to be her long lost son, is he who he seems to be, or is she starting to lose her mind ?

I really like movies about the strangeness of the mother-son relationship (Psycho, The Manchurian Candidate) and this, from the pen of the brilliantly perverse Dennis Potter, is possibly the strangest. Its clever touch is in never explaining the Oldman character; he probably only exists in Russell's head, but equally he might be real, or he might be just a calculating psychopath (Potter used the same idea in Brimstone And Treacle, where the character is also called Martin). But as a metaphor for both Oedipal repression and the desire not to grow up (slyly mirrored in Lloyd's obsession with toy trains),he is endlessly fascinating and Oldman's histrionic performance is sensational. Russell too is amazing, in an impossible part, playing the whole movie with her eyebrows lowered quizzically, and the sexual tension between her and Oldman is incredible. Purists may claim their ages are wrong - he's too old and she's too young - but they are perfect casting, and Lloyd and Bernhard provide great wacky support, almost as if they are in a separate movie of their own. I love all the witty maternal references in this movie; it starts with John Lennon's song Mother (he was raised mostly by an aunt),the trucker's tattoos, at one point Oldman mashes a knife into an egg and at another he plays the old traditional song M-O-T-H-E-R on the piano, the clips from the erotically-charged Cape Fear on TV, etc. Beautifully shot by Alex Thomson throughout, with all sorts of clever visual tricks to keep us guessing at the characters' mental states. Produced by Rick McCallum (of Star Wars fame),funded by George Harrison's Handmade Films and shot at the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group studios in North Carolina. This is a great primal scream of a movie, in equal parts bamboozling, funny and thought-provoking, with one-of-a-kind performances; a film for all mothers and sons to see, although probably best not together. This was the fourth of Roeg's six intriguing movies with his former wife Russell, and for my money their best one together (although they both made better films separately).

A doctor's wife (Theresa Russell) tires of his obsession with model trains, and spends her days wondering about the son she gave up for adoption at birth...

How can you not love a film with Christopher Lloyd as a masochist doctor who drops his pants? And Gary Oldman as a weird, British man-child? And directed by the wonderfully under-appreciated Nicholas Roeg ("Don't Look Now")? Well, with this film, it is possible.

Janet Maslin has more than a few problems with it, as she says "the direction is so laden with contempt for the characters... Roeg's films can often be perverse... (but) they are rarely this silly." The film is "too mindless to have any impact" and she believes the actors' skills are "regrettably wasted". I will agree with that last point -- for as much as I love Oldman and Lloyd, I felt they were too confined by this film to really show off.

Roger Ebert gave the film three stars, despite saying he did not like it. He posits the idea that the film is "perhaps deliberately" unlikeable. Yet, the film is still a good one and "more interesting" because of it. Roeg's work is "strange" and "convoluted", as well as "bad-tempered, kinky and misogynistic."

While I am unsure of all that, I do agree with the overall point Ebert makes. I, like him, did not enjoy the movie. Yet, I see the psychological message it was trying to send, the odd symbolism and the cacophony of images. The direction is, in fact, top-notch. Oldman is frustratingly annoying, but that is who his character is. I think the goal was met, despite being a goal I had rather they were not striving for.

The bored, lonely wife of a retirement-home physician in North Carolina dreams up an adult embodiment of the baby boy taken away from her when she was an unmarried teenager who got knocked-up at the county fair. Her husband, a train enthusiast, has no patience with his wife's melancholia and cheats on her with his lascivious nurse, while the young man/substitute son comes to represent the wife's anger and isolation. Disconnected filmmaker Nicolas Roeg predictably provides no simple solutions for our heroine, and screenwriter Dennis Potter (who would seem to be the perfect movie-companion for Roeg) merrily keeps the inscrutable scenario on a schizophrenic track. This isn't the weirdest movie to come from either Roeg or Potter--the film, in fact, is one of Roeg's more accessible entries--but very few of the details or ideas come to fruition (such as the wife always being dressed in lavender, or her fetish for cartoons and dolls). Gary Oldman, just off "Sid and Nancy", seems stuck in a revolving door of violent angst and aggression (only in a later scene at the piano does he show some charm),while Christopher Lloyd (as Henry Henry--perhaps an ancestor of Humbert Humbert) relies far too much on his rubbery facial expressions. In the lead, Theresa Russell works hard at conveying her character's inner-demons; in the vivid flashback scenes to her youth, she makes a terrific impression just by using her faraway eyes and smile. However, Russell never gets her little-girl twang quite right--her voice sounds disembodied--and her temper tantrums aren't shaped and have no comic pay-off (which is the fault of the director, who turns a blind eye). After the perverse-glossiness of something like 1986's "Blue Velvet", the scrubby ordinariness of "Track 29" is disappointing and dispiriting (it was shot by Alex Thomson, who has worked with Roeg before). Roeg, a brilliant cinematographer in his youth, gets a kinetic vibe going in the flashbacks to the fairground; however, aside from those startling early shots and some stray funny moments, "Track 29" seems to lose its way awfully soon, and the apocalyptic final act is simply a mess. *1/2 from ****