Stark and starker from get-go up to and including end-credits, Northfork opens against austere Margaret Bourke-White photos, including, appropriately, her inaugural-issue cover for Luce's Life, the 1936 Fort Peck Dam, Montana.That celebrated photojournalist of industrial forms "captured beauty in a world not usually perceived as beautiful." So, too, director Michael Polish teams as co-writer/-producer with twin brother Mark to picture an elemental beauty in the finale of their Heartland USA trilogy and the first actually filmed on location, in twenty-four northern Montana days. (The first two, Twin Falls, Idaho, and Jackpot, totaled twenty-one days.)

Sporting little commercial appeal and probably not much more, either, on the art-house circuit, this one bites off more than it can chew, even without the brothers' elaborate claims for it. Yet if flawed, it is fascinating, acquiring depth on afterthought, the stuff of cult status down the road.

Surreally, a coffin pops out onto rough waves on a cold flood-lake. We hear a voice, so soft and raspy as to be unintelligible. It belongs to bearded, slightly scruffy, lame Father Harlan, a slimmed down Nick Nolte in yet one more of his occasional offbeat labors of love. The good Father ministers to a dying town in 1955, one that Authority has deemed will lie beneath the waters created by a new hydroelectric dam.

The townspeople leave, their sedans piled with portable property, and one couple brings back to the priest the orphan Irwin (Duel Farnes), too sickly to travel but an "angel," nevertheless, remarks Harlan. A handful, however, refuse to abandon their isolated houses, so half a dozen lookalike agent Smiths are promised lakefront acreage for convincing the   recalcitrants. 

Otherwise indistinguishable from fellow agents in black cars and shoes, dark suits, ties, hats and overcoats, only Walter (James Woods), accompanied by his partner-and-son Willis (Mark Polish), has an issue, for late wife Patricia O'Brien rests nearly alone in Northfork Cemetery, therefore "please make arrangements immediately."

So much for reality. Were this all, some Okie saga might have been developed, well or ill, a socially conscious tale of Individuals vs. impersonal State. But the Brothers Polish speak elsewhere of the Magical Realism movement of Latin American literature, "a labyrinth of labyrinths."

In his feverish dying dreams, Irwin calls into being the love that, except for the devoted man of God, has not been offered in his short life. Objects and desires are incorporated into the soul's reality: a dog-headed cane is a stick-legged dog or a toy airplane becomes an Elijah-chariot to Heaven, and a misfit foursome of angels assumes characteristics from comic books and vases in a weird search for a missing unknown cherub. Bearing in afterlife the bodily and emotional inadequacies of life, the four are quirky to the verge of incompetence but are led to accept the orphan on the insistence of childless Angel Flower Hercules, a mechanical-moving Daryl Hannah in another not-quite-human rôle.

Northfork moves back and forth between depressing, detailed Edward Hopper-Charles Sheeler realism and the slightly less detailed impossibility of ultraísmo, a Daliesque dreamworld. These extremes are related in several ways, as for example by recurring objects, such as wings in a painting, a pharmacist's moustache, the six agents' lapel pins and paired mounted antlers as well as angel, duck or goose feathers, and carried as evacuation incentive in mystery black trunks and the orphan's Fender Stratocaster case.

Slanting through narrow venetian blinds, strong back lighting alternates with magnificent yet inhospitable nature that dwarfs human beings. Many suggestions are here, but few definitions, in a laconic dialogue of humor and puns so dry that they are easily missed. Potentially rich episodes are introduced, then left hanging -- the brief lustful couple and male-voiced waitress Ursula, the aptly named Mr. Stallings (Marshall Bell) and his Noah's-ark house and two Mrs. Stallings, a lonely open-ended church with vistas, houses and diners that resound and shake, and Walter's momentary second-storey vision.

Ambitious, in need of tightening, droll, low-key, in color but grey, witty and difficult, too long and not long enough, Northfork will prove an ordeal for most. It is also great fun. Its reality, challenge and satisfaction seem, as blind master Magical Realist Juan Luis Borges put it, like "something we are about to understand, but never quite do."

(Released by Paramount Classics and rated "PG-13" for brief sexuality.)