American Woman (2019)
Directed by Jake Scott
Roadside Attractions, 111 minutes, R (language, drug/alcohol use)
★★★
With under $237,000 in ticket sales, American Woman didn’t exactly light up the box office. I suppose that’s understandable given its harrowing subject of a woman whose daughter goes missing. It’s also an uneven effort with a cast drawn from the B-list, though its central actor, Sienna Miller, is the real deal who papers over many of the plot holes. She makes American Woman worth a look, despite its translucent cavities.
American Woman is set in Pennsylvania, but Keystoners won’t recognize anything; it was filmed in Massachusetts. The central character is 33-year-old Deb Callahan (Sienna Miller), a single mother to 16-year-old Bridget (Sky Ferreira). Mom is a mess. She lives close to the margin, drinks and smokes too much, has a horrible attitude, and even worse taste in men. It’s not clear if she’s just easy or if she’s doing a little hooking on the side, but Bridget’s father is not in evidence. Deb is the sort to tell anyone to piss off, and that includes her mother Peggy (Amy Madigan), and her sister Katherine (Christina Kendricks) and her husband Terry (Will Sasso), who live across the street.
Bridget is no peach either. She’s rough around her dyed hair edges, hangs out with druggies, and has an infant son of her own. Deb and Bridget rocket back and forth between bickering and affection of sorts. The status quo changes over night, when Deb reluctantly agrees to watch Jesse and Bridget never returns. Joni Mitchell famously wrote, “You don’t what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone,” and that’s Deb’s breaking point. Foul play is suspected, but there’s really no evidence for it–one of the film’s holes. The longer Bridget is missing, the more hysterical Deb becomes and the more Bridget becomes more mythical than real.
How does one recover from such a blow? Deb’s first instincts are in keeping with her play-tough and live-fast-and-hard patterns. She lights out after Bridget’s boyfriend, who is Jesse’s father, though there’s nothing to connect him to anything other than being a worthless druggie. Old habits die hard. For Deb, there’s always another boyfriend and it hardly matters if he’s married and/or abusive. It’s only when she hits the muddy bottom that she begins to consider crawling out of the pit. After all, someone has to raise Jesse.
Another film hole is that the passage of time is too rapidly truncated. Deb does begin to get her act together and starts to see Tyler (Alex Neustaeder), an affectionate ex-boyfriend who is a rehabbing addict. More bad things will happen, and Bridget becomes what detectives call a “cold” case. That will be resolved eventually and one wonders if maybe it would have been better had that not been the case. There are plenty of good things to say about this film, but Brad Ingelsby’s script is not among them.
American Woman could have been the turkey its box office suggests, were it not for Miller. She is an underrated actress, perhaps because she has played so many bit parts, has no time for the tabloid press, prefers London to Hollywood, and took time away from movies to perform in theatre. Her filmography isn’t impressive, but her acting chops are. In American Woman she invents her own cycle of grieving: blame, swear, give-up, clear out the garbage, reinvent, and cope. Hers is a portrait of hope tempered by realism. She makes the second half of the film as good as the first half is bad. Although we could use more films about the plight of the working-class poor, Inglesby misfires by writing Miller’s early role as akin to Julia Roberts’ bad-girl act in Mystic Pizza sans her heart of gold. It makes it harder to believe in Deb’s subsequent transformation, but Miller rises to the occasion. Best of all, it comes on Deb’s terms. Hold the metaphorical knight in shining armor or deus ex machina resolutions.
The dynamics between Miller and Hendricks are also quite good. Katherine is the good angel to Deb’s devil, with Terry acting as referee. Yet, we see genuine caring peeking through the seams, as well as evolving relationships. I wish the same could be said of Amy Madigan’s role as Peggy. She isn’t given much to do and responds with a walk-through performance appropriate for what was on offer. The same can be said of E. Roger Mitchell, who plays Detective Sergeant Morris. One could accuse director Jake Scott of tokenism, as Mitchell’s is the only black face in sight.
You can expect rocky moments, but American Woman is a great example of how a few good performances redeem a half-baked script.
Rob Weir
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