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And she does! It's true. The title for this post was almost 'I'll Suck Your Dick If You Give Me The Job I Want', but I decided against it... instead putting it in the opening paragraph. Yeah!
Sherry (Maggie Gyllenhaal, who we love, remember) is the reformed addict of the title, SherryBaby
, fresh out of prison and on a curfew, moving into a halfway house filled with other women in similar situations. All she wants is her baby, Alexis (Ryan Simpkins - seriously, are the Simpkins' the new Fannings? This is the fourth film after Revolutionary Road, Little Children and A Single Man that one or both have been in) back, who is currently living with her brother, Bobby (Brad William Henke) and his wife Lynette (Bridget Barkan.) Bobby is happy that Sherry is out, but Lynette is less than pleased, especially when Sherry, in anger and frustration at the halfway house and those who living inside it, decides to decamp to their place in New Jersey. Bobby's rule is that there are to be no drugs in the house, but Lynette just wants her gone, and isn't afraid to turn Alexis against her mother.
Sherry and Bobby's father Bob Sr (Sam Bottoms) visits with his new wife and they give Sherry a drink, not realising that all addiction is her problem, not just the heroin they recognise. Sherry gets emotional but while being comforted by her father he touches her breast - Sherry, not apparently upset by this, but by everything in general, leaves and goes out to score. She uses before turning up to her AA meeting under the influence, helped by her friend Dean (Danny Trejo), who takes her home and helps her to clean up. Meanwhile, Sherry has moved out of her brother's house and into a motel, where her parole office visits. She confesses she has been using, and pleads for outpatient rehab treatment - she is told that her only options are inpatient or jail. He gives her the weekend to decide, and she takes Alexis on a mini-golfing bonding trip, only to take her over the border on her way to escaping to Florida - though she never makes it all the way.
Gyllenhaal's performance is powerful in a movie that is otherwise only a little better than average. As the conflicted, addicted mother she turns a treat, over the top and attention craving as you can see that her weakness is still very much there, not really hidden under the surface, instead gripping her powerfully in its claws as she badly tries to ignore it. You can see that her only real desire to get clean is to stay with her daughter. Being clean in itself doesn't overly appeal to her - she hasn't been rehabilitated to that extent - and if Alexis weren't around I'm sure she would have been back on the dope much faster than it took for her to finally succumb. But Alexis is a powerful incentive - though not immediately powerful enough.
Henke is very good as her long-suffering but devoted brother, showing her uncompromising love and support despite how much she has screwed up in the past. His love for Alexis as his own is touching, and his ability to calmly ignore the protestations of his spouse in favour of the blood relationship never offends Lynette. He manages to respect his wife without alienating his sister, and Henke is in a big way responsible for this split.
The remainder of the supports are small roles that are pulled off perfectly fine. The film itself, however, seems to kind of travel along quietly without really seeming to get somewhere. As a portrait of addiction and desire it works fine, but without any redemption or closure it just feels a little hollow. In the end, it ends up feeling a bit empty, unfinished. But for debut writer/director Laurie Collyer, it's a reasonably good start. I'm sure she has a lot left in her. 3 stars.
I must confess that that line from the trailer, delivered by my love Maggie Gyllenhaal, was a big part of me wanting to see Away We Go. Well, Maggie Gyllenhaal is a good enough reason for me to see a film, period. But she just looked hilarious in this film, and she was. Pity the film didn't live up to what I was ultimately hoping for.
Co-written by Dave Eggars (he behind the script for Where The Wild Things Are), I was a little worried. For the most part I thoroughly enjoyed his memoirs A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, though I think it got too much and went on for too long. For a lot of it, however, I thought it was terrific. Similarly, Away We Go has some very good elements, but I think he gets a little carried away with his own writing and fails to reign it in when he needs to, refocusing or truly realising the deeper possibilities of his subtext and smaller themes, swept along by his own grand narrative. And then, Sam Mendes, acclaimed theatre director who has previously made the very theatrical (in a sense - at least quasi-traditionalist and visually conservative) American Beauty, Road To Perdition, Jarhead (forgot he made that) and Revolutionary Road, now tackling an American indie film. Interesting.
Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are an early-thirties couple about to have a baby. Unsure that they're mature enough to do it, though embracing the coming challenge wholeheartedly, they are dealt a blow when they break it to Burt's parents (Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels) to be told that, a month before the baby is due, they are going to be moving to Belgium. As the proximity to Burt's parents was one of the reasons the couple were residing in that area of the world, they decide to go on a road trip to various cities around North America where they know people, hoping to find a place where they fit in and might want to call home. An hilarious cast of characters played by some fabulous people (Alison Janney, aforementioned Gyllenhaal, Melanie Lynskey, to name some of the bigger players) populate their road trip before Burt and Verona discover that a home is not necessarily about those around you, but rather what is there between you.
It's a clever script a lot of the time, notwithstanding what I mentioned above, and quite funny a lot of the time, especially with the hyped up caricatures, particularly from Gyllenhaal and Janney, but it doesn't really go anywhere. The nature of the episodic road trip breaks up the narrative, but also drags it a little into repetition - you keep wondering what is going wrong. And you also spend a lot of time wondering what inspired this couple to think that these people could be good people to surround themselves with, as for many of them they either didn't know them that well to start with, or haven't known them for some years. It all seems a little flighty and preposterous.
Mendes also seems a little lost outside of his controlled comfort zone of sets and enclosed spaces (even the desert scenes in Jarhead were enclosed by their own epic scale), framing and directing by rote. The film lacked the complex visual stylings of his previous works - a two hander doesn't lend itself to the kind of composition I spoke about here. The performances were pretty solid, Krasinski and especially Rudolph managing to bring a little depth to their characters, with the supports hamming it up just enough to get the laughs and make the point without really lapsing over into hyperbole. But all in all... just a little blah. A little nothing. Nothing that bad, that's for sure, but just nothing very good either. 2.5 stars.
