‘Green and Gold’ Review: Aggressively Uplifting Sentimental Drama About a Farmer Desperate to Save His Land

variety.com:

Joe Leydon Film Critic Craig T. Nelson is an extremely fine and too often underappreciated actor, and it’s difficult not to be at least mildly impressed by his absolutely fearless lead performance in “Green and Gold.” In director Anders Lindwall’s ponderous and predictable drama, he plays Buck, a debt-ridden Wisconsin dairy farmer who’s way too proud and tradition-bound to change his ways, and ultimately so desperate that he literally agrees to bet the farm in order to save it.

To put it bluntly, Nelson gives this clichéd indie a lot more than it ever gives him. Hank is not always an easy man to like, and it’s obvious that neither Nelson nor Lindwall wants to make him any more likable than he has to be.

Lean and leathery, with a stoic grimace as his facial expression of choice, Hank is a salt-of-the-earth guy who loves Margaret (Annabel Armour), his supportive and infinitely patient wife of several years, and Jenny (Madison Lawlor), his musically inclined granddaughter, only slightly less than his beloved Green Bay Packers.

But that doesn’t mean he’s willing to listen to them or anyone else when it comes to updating his low-tech equipment — he appears to relish using a horse-drawn plow instead of a tractor — or changing much of anything else about his life and work.