THE WHEAT FIELD

Wife-swapping and presidential politics bring messy excitement to small-town Wisconsin in the closing days of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign.

The innocence of the mid-century makes the sex somehow smuttier in the latest Upper Midwest thriller from Thayer (Moon Over Lake Elmo, 2001, etc.). And there’s plenty of sex to be shocked by in little Kickapoo Falls, gateway to the beautiful but tourist-trashed Wisconsin Dells, where WWII sniper Pliny Pennington, deputy sheriff and a bit of a voyeur, patrols the backroads, catching couplers, dispensing justice and waiting for his much-admired boss Sheriff Fats Galatowich to retire. Deputy Pennington is Fats’s heir presumptive, but that presumption is no longer a sure thing since the discovery of two nude corpses in the middle of a mysterious circle in an otherwise unmysterious wheat field. The bodies of the late Michael and Maggie Butler have been symbolically mutilated: she’s missing her famously beautiful face, and he’s missing his reproductive system, both blown away by somebody’s shotgun. The Deputy finds it difficult to distance himself professionally. He has been in love with Maggie since high school, and as someone whose own reproductive system took a hit in the war, there’s a connection with Michael, too. Pennington’s investigation immediately lands him in hot water with creepy Webster Sprague, a Nixon backer and congressional candidate who, with his rich wife Caren, has been whiling away those long Wisconsin winters making sex films with and of the Butlers. When Sprague’s advice to Pennington to stop poking into things and start accepting Sheriff Fats’s ridiculous murder/suicide theory goes unheeded, the deputy, one of maybe six Democrats in the county, sees that job promotion start to disappear and finds himself the new center of suspicion. Before things are sorted out, the Tricky Dick will make an appearance in nearby Madison, the sniper will be sniped at, and Pennington, searching for that missing Mrs. Sprague, will make a visit to his family’s ancestral home, Nantucket, passing Hyannis on election night and getting a taste of deadly politics.

Alfred Hitchcock and Oliver Stone milk agreeable thrills from the Dairy State.