2/5
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As a filmgoer, amidst the bilge and what occasionally seems like malicious excruciation, the movies that cause the most heartache are not the total disasters but the failures that so clearly should have hit the ground running. Nothing is more painful than wanting to embrace a film more than it allows me to, and rarely are there clearer cases of this than Stockholm, Pennsylvania. It is a film with a top-notch cast and a premise pregnant with pathos and possibility, and yet its weaknesses are so obvious and proudly present that watching it yields something between anger and an intimate sense of betrayal. I brought to the table everything I needed to love this movie, and the fact that it never reciprocated that gesture left me feeling personally hurt.
The film’s opening images immediately generate the kind of intrigue you hope for in a drama like this; a girl, Leia, dazed and stone-faced in the back of a car, gazing out the window. We wonder where’s she going and where she came from, and the moment she steps out onto the sidewalk, she’s welcomed by a frenzy of cameras and reporters. We discover that she isn’t a celebrity but a young girl who has finally been returned after years of captivity. It’s the perfect happy-ending headline, and yet not all is as it seems. When she meets her parents for the first time in a decade and a half, she hasn’t the slightest inkling of a connection with them. They are aliens to her, and to some extant, so is she to them. She was raised by her captor, and so whatever life she had previous to her abduction doesn’t seem to exist in her mind. Her parents call her Leanne, and yet she combats this, telling them she was named after a princess. This begins what we assume will be a process of re-assimilation but gradually evolves into something far more sinister.
It is here in her parents’ home that the film’s fatal flaw immediately reveals itself; as hard and earnestly as she seems to try, debut writer-director Nickole Beckwith simply doesn’t have a firm grasp on the either the human meter or the complexities of her material. Her characters speak in stilted, clumsy constructions that I presume are intended to sound naturalistic but merely end up stale and lacking in anything approaching spark or lyricism. The sheltered and emotionally blank Leia, played by an utterly wasted Saoirse Ronan, gets away with this to some extant given the hermetically-sealed nature of her upbringing, but her mother (Cynthia Nixon) and father (David Warshofsky) seem to struggle with behaving like human beings, let alone aching parents, with dialog that makes the deliberately obtuse lingual experiments of Cosmopolis sound as if they suddenly course with the milk of humanity. The script was, according to Beckwith, initially written as a play and then adapted for film. As I watched, I was left wondering if the nuance had simply been lost in translation or, as I suspect, it was never there to begin with.
Then again, you might argue, I am simply being nit-picky. Writing, after all, is as particular and unpredictable a discipline as any, and judging a film on its sensibility alone is perhaps unfair. However, the film’s dialog is indicative of naiveté in Beckwith’s approach that eventually becomes too deeply engrained in the film to forgive. Every time she’s given a choice between genuine insight and pulpy contrivance, she pursues the latter, and the result is a story that strains itself into various dilemmas and parallels without providing them with any consistent emotional foundation. We’re given many scenes that are intended to probe the minds of the characters, and hardly any of them manage to break the surface. Saoirse Ronan was apparently fascinated by Leia because she had no discernible arc. I was left with the same thought after the film that I had before: “You can’t be serious.”
The fact that the film’s select virtues shine as brightly as they do only serve to make the experience that much more frustrating. At certain points in the drama, we are cast back to Leia’s childhood with her captor, Ben, shot through with considerable truth by Jason Isaacs. It’s never explicitly stated what his motivation was taking Leia, and whenever Isaacs is on screen, it doesn’t need to be. He is an enigma, a menace, and, perhaps most crucially, a person who genuinely purports to have done the right thing. Whatever else might have been on about his mind, his affection for Leia rings true, and their scenes together brim with so much pain and intimacy that they simply highlight how empty the rest really is. Where is this clarity elsewhere in the movie? Where is this control?
All of this is tied together by an ending so haunting that is deserves to punctuate a better film. It is the perfect conclusion for a film that sadly doesn’t exist, and the fact that it easily could have only underlines my disappointment. It raises exactly the kind of questions that should have been intricately woven throughout everything that preceded it. Nicole Beckwith is not untalented. In certain transitions and aesthetic choices, she shows instances of staggering potential as a filmmaker, but she lacks the maturity to properly to justice to the rich material she’s given herself. I see a great number of extraordinary things in her future. If only this film was one of them.
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Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: www.spencermoleda.com
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: [email protected]