Macon Grainger didn’t have an easy childhood. The child of traveling circus performers in the Deep South, his troubles began before he had even left his mother’s womb when his father, the circus’s knife thrower, rolled a little too deep with some meth and toilet wine before the nightly show. One twitchy slip of the wrist later and poor Macon took a knife to the dome in utero, forcing his mama into early labor and Macon to come into the world two months early and with some extensive cerebrocortical development issues.
This charming crowd-pleaser in the spirit of Forrest Gump follows Macon from his youth as an ugly, angry child through adulthood.
From his days at the circus being kept in a pen with wild dogs, to his daring escape one stormy night when lightning strikes the big top and sets the circus ablaze, and his stowing away on a train with “famous” hobos Ransom Jack and Slackjaw Sam, Macon’s youth is filled with adventure and sadness, his brain injury leaving him unable to communicate beyond saying his name over and over again, and a dysfunctional gustatory complex meaning he cannot smell or taste any food.
Macon’s trajectory changes one fateful day when Slackjaw Sam indulges in too much applejack and falls out of the boxcar they are in, landing on a neighboring railroad line just as another train is going by, cutting him clean in half. Macon and Ransom Jack jump out to try and help him but it’s too late.
“Well,” Jack says, “no reason to leave him here and waste all that good man bacon,” to which Macon replies, “Macon!”
“That’s right kid.”
That night Jack has carefully filleted strips of his hobo partner and is grilling them over a small fire, and for the first time in his life Macon can smell the food cooking in front of him. He not only eats and relishes the cannibalistic treat, but immediately sets upon trying to cook the rest of old Slackjaw Sam. Soon even Ransom has had his fill, but Macon is just getting started, and his newly found desire for man bacon along with his unlikely knack for the culinary arts will take him on a murderously delicious tour of the cuisine and characters of the American South. Coming to theaters this International Bacon Day.