Hybrid 2000

Hybrid is the most pleasingly unconventional documentary portrait in recent memory. Filmed and edited over a period of six years, it recounts the strange and marvelous career of 100-year-old Iowa corn farmer Milford Beeghly, McCollum’s grandfather. Stitching together a crazy quilt of interviews with Beeghly’s children and second wife (wedded when he was 94), skits and monologues performed by the patriarch himself, three self-produced TV sales pitches from the 50s, long-take shots of static Iowa farmscapes, and hysterical snippets of pixilated corncobs engaging in lewd behavior, McCollum – with the assistance of avant-gardist Ariana Gerstein – has fashioned a thoroughly uncategorizable movie experience. This is no mean feat…

Beeghly holds the screen with unfailing reserves of grizzled panache. Tromping around his fields or discoursing on experimental techniques of hybridization, he claims a place alongside archetypal heartland eccentrics celebrated from Mark Twain to Jane Smiley. So when we see him enfeebled and close to death in a white-on-white hospital bed, it feels as if we are witnessing the last gasp of an indelible cultural myth. But lo and behold, Beeghly quits his deathbed just in time for a gala centennial birthday party. The director as well seems reluctant to say good-bye and in the last 15 minutes stretches his material way too thin. Fortunately, the protracted ending fails to dampen Hybrid’s prodigiously wacko energies. — Paul Arthur, Film Comment, 5-6/01

Mr McCollum treats Beeghly, with his all-American vaudevillian personality, like a colossus. With his reedy voice and deep-focus concentration, the farmer grabs center stage with casual power, the intensity of the true eccentric…

The peculiarities of Beeghly’s pursuit are made clear when the physiological phenomenon of corn is explained in openly sexual terms. Some of the innuendo comes with nudges heavy enough to earn Hybrid assault charges…

But corn turns out to be such a sensual and bewitching presence that we understand why it demanded so much of Beeghly’s attention. And why his children suffered because of the place that corn occupied in his life; he ignored them so that he could keep digging for just the right blend of attributes for his stalks. It’s also evident why Hybrid consumed six years of Mr McCollum’s life. He wants to understand what drove his grandfather, and in the process he has come up with a tricky and tremendous film that examines what work means to the soul… — Elvis Mitchell, NY Times, 3/4/01