Upamanyu Biswas
Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater’s comedy-drama film ‘Downtown Owl’ unearths the disparate but interconnected lives of the residents of a small North Dakota town known as Owl. The quaint settlement is removed from the rest of civilization, and it has an internal logic and dynamic unique to its existence. In the film, outsider Julia Rabia slowly acquaints herself with the strange ways of the town while also trying to find a place for herself. Owl’s inhabitants have their own personal issues to deal with, each attempting to mount a new way to grow. As the film follows the lives of these struggling people, the essence of the town significantly envelops them!
The Real-Life Counterpart to Owl
The town of Owl is a fictional place conceived by Chuck Klosterman, the author of the 2008 eponymous novel, which serves as the source material for ‘Downtown Owl.’ Hamish Linklater and Lily Rabe brought it to life cinematically through a script penned by the former. Owl is a small village in the middle of nowhere with a few bars, diners, and cafes to help people socialize outside the confines of their homes. The town has a high school where Julia starts working as a new teacher, coming across various people, including another central character named Mitch, who plays football for the high school team. She also befriends Horace at the Big Harley’s, where she learns that his wife was diagnosed with a severe illness.
Although the town is fictional, its roots can be traced back to Klosterman’s past. The author grew up in Wyndmere, North Dakota, attending the Wyndmere School while living on a nearby farm. His experiences growing up in the place inspired his work considerably. However, Owl is not entirely based on his childhood hometown. Instead, it is an amalgamation of the towns he and his friends had lived in throughout their lives. Thus, Wyndmere is far less integral to Owl than it seems at first glance.
Klosterman elaborated on the genesis of Owl, saying, “It’s much more a composite of not just my town but also particularly the towns of people I went to college with, stories about what their town was like growing up. I always thought it’d be interesting as a reader to find a book about a place similar to where I grew up and set during a time that I find very interesting because it was kind of before the acceleration of technology.” The writer revealed that due to the subjective nature of his writing, his influences filtered into the narrative, although it was not his main goal.
While adapting the work into the film’s script, Linklater also tried to get closer to the origins of Owl by visiting places where Klosterman grew up. He said in an interview, “I went to his hometown, where the novel is set. I mean, Owl is fictional, but you can Google ‘Where did Chuck Klosterman go to high school?’ and it’ll tell you. Google will. So then I went to the town, and the towns around, and totally fell in love with the landscape and the people who populate it.” The visits helped him form a complete picture of the main setting despite its fictional conception.
‘Downtown Owl’ was filmed in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the neighboring regions of Minneapolis, Elko New Market, and Independence. The production crew utilized several locales to weave together the titular town, including the services of a studio set in Los Angeles, California. Ultimately, the team was focused on bringing Owl to life authentically, not just through narration but as a place that feels lived in with a sense of history. Despite the small, realistic touches to its creation and the inspirations from the author’s past, Owl is a settlement that does not exist in reality.
Read More: Downtown Owl: Is the Movie Based on a True Story?
