Smithville on Film

Smithville is a picture of small-town Texas so complete that Hollywood keeps borrowing it whole. In 1998 Forest Whitaker filmed Hope Floats here, wrapping Sandra Bullock and Harry Connick Jr. in the town's shady streets and its low brick storefronts, and the movie made Smithville a modest kind of famous. A decade later Terrence Malick came looking for a lost 1950s America for The Tree of Life and found it in the same downtown blocks and old homes. This short driving loop visits the public places the cameras loved — the railroad town's Main Street, its restored depot museum, and a pair of period homes — while leaving the one private residence most associated with the movies exactly where it belongs: off the map. Come for the film history; stay for the intact turn-of-the-century town underneath it.