ginseng

GINSENG is a story about forgiveness and redemption - about the horrible ordeal a man named RICK must endure when his beaten-down drunk of a father, JERRY, cajoles him into a two-week camping trip in the Appalachians. Rick is angry at his father, and his wife is five-months pregnant. He really doesn’t want to go. But Jerry (unbeknownst to his son) is terminally ill. As the story begins, he picks up his forty-five and blows away his pet bird, then prepares to kill himself as well. Before he can, Rick succumbs to pressure from his wife and returns his father’s call, agreeing to the trip. The two bicker on the road, until an encounter with an erudite redneck named VIRGIL, and his buddies BO and DEREK, sets the stage for the eventual, DELIVERANCE-esque showdown. Father and son hike off into the woods. Then Jerry contrives a reason to go off the main trail, where a fight between the two sends Rick tumbling into a ravine, breaking his leg. As they struggle their way back out of the wilderness, father and son begin to understand each other a bit better. Jerry gets a glimmer of the depth of pain his alcoholism has caused, and Rick begins to see his father in a new light. He tells his father about his wife’s current pregnancy, and her previous miscarriages. Their bonding is interrupted, however, when Virgil reappears and takes Rick captive to try and flush out Jerry, who’d fallen asleep while standing guard in the forest. Jerry shoots Bo, and Virgil and Derek run off. Now our two heroes are even more banged up, and have an angry redneck after them. They stumble through the forest to an isolated cabin, where another violent encounter stirs things up even more. They frantically careen away down the path, barely dodging their pursuers before Rick finally realizes that his father’s been shot. After one final, brutal showdown in the woods, Rick joins his father on a panorama ridge overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. Jerry reveals that he’s terminally ill, and the two share a moment of redemption. Rick buries his father and finds the courage to make it out of the woods on his own - a man changed by the experience. In a final, emotional scene, Rick returns years later with his own son to the spot where he buried his father.