Sunlight Jr. (2013. dir: Laurie Collyer) It's the polar opposite of the Hollywood Movie. It's about a poverty-stricken, unmarried couple, mostly unemployed and without prospects, but with some unfortunate family ties and exes, and evanescent dreams of parenthood quashed under the weight of reality.
Naomi Watts and Matt Dillon are Melissa and Richie, so they're pleasant enough to be around. The couple share a genuine love, but little else. She's got a tenuous hold on a godawful job at a convenience store and he's in a wheelchair, collecting a meagre monthly check and siphoning gasoline at midnight off nearby parked cars. Her mother (Tess Harper) has a house filled with foster kids but no food in the cupboards, an ongoing whiskey habit, and a landlord who is Melissa's ex-boyfriend, who has taken to stalking her again, since the restraining order expired. Then she realizes she's pregnant...
The whole thing is far less depressing than it sounds, because Dillon and Watts keep a semblance of humor through the hard times, and because it's set in Florida and so there are stray pelicans and herons in random shots, and because we get the story in short enough scenes that none of them are allowed to become oppressive, as, say, Cassavetes might gleefully have done. Also, there's an oddly uplifting J. Mascis drone-score propping up the backside, and, of course, there's Norman Reedus.
Yeah, he's the stalker-ex, and this role was written for him. He knows it backwards, takes it to town, does everything just right, but still makes it all unexpected and true. Someone online described this as Daryl Dixon if the zombie apocalypse never happened, but that's disturbingly unfair to Daryl (unless I'm romanticizing him, which is certainly possible). The early scene in which he hangs out at her store to annoy her, going out of his way to be vulgar but then allowing a terrible moment of vulnerability, is genius. Later, his reaction when she attacks his car with a crowbar is perfect, and when she at last comes to him for help, the subtlety of the triumph on his face is a work of art.
On top of its other attractions, this movie is important because it discusses a woman's right to a safe and affordable abortion in an intelligent way, and without any discussion.
Rating: three stars
Reedus Factor: four stars
Meskada: (2010. dir: Josh Sternfeld) Resigned to watching yet another by-the-numbers cop thing in which every tenth human is a serial killer and the cops use terms like "unsub" and "forthwith" and say things like "Boss, I've got footsteps with directionality," (OK, dipshit. ALL footprints have directionality. Whichever way the toe is pointing, do you get me?) I was pleasantly surprised by Meskada. From the outset adopting a tone of nostalgic melancholy, it becomes, long before the end, heartbreaking.
There's none of that self-righteous, White Hats v Black Hats stuff you see all over network television. In Meskada County, everyone is cast in several shades of grey, and if they're not, it's because we don't get to know them well enough. One of the main flaws of the movie, in fact, is that we only get to know two of the women at all, a bartender and the mother of the victim. Even the main cop's partner remains largely an enigma, other than that she's "foxy" and can, despite weighing 90 pounds soaking wet, beat the crap out of strong men or intimidate them into a corner with her wielding of a shotgun in a bar; in short, just the same as most woman TV cops, except brunette instead of redhead or blond. She's given an awkward minute early on in which to introduce herself, and does so in a terse, emotionless monologue in which the writer/director was obviously not invested.
In any case, let's look instead at Norman Reedus. After watching a couple of weak entries in his CV, I was starting to think that maybe I was giving him too much credit, but this one restored my faith. He plays a soi-disant white-trash guy who's a suspect because he's got a record, is an asshole to cops, and is too proud to admit he was cheating on his wife at the time of the murder. The role plays to all his strengths, and he doesn't make a wrong move, whether he's interacting with his sick kid, throwing down against his couch-surfing brother-in-law, or interrupting his police interrogation to make a tentative move on the foxy girl from the sheriff's department.
There's a clumsy truth to the way things lead, one to another, in this story. Small mistakes are made and lead to dire consequences, which lead to heightened emotions and graver mistakes. Among a host of good performances, Nick Stahl as our disintegrating cop-hero and Jonathan Tucker as a good man driven to larceny by lack of work in his dying town both deserve mention. And although it may seem like I was disparaging the foxy-partner, in truth, Rachel Nichols is particularly impressive in the role, digging into the stoicism of her barely-written character with both hands, and coming up with three believable dimensions.
Rating: three stars
Reedus Factor: four stars
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