Ah, the things we do for love. As the hard-luck Allison, Florence Pugh really goes through it in the latest torrent of miscalculated uplift from cineaste Zach Braff, written and produced in the thick of their much-murmured-about romantic relationship: absent Dad, alcoholic Mom, a fateful car crash, grief, guilt, opioid addiction, foil-smoking heroin in an alley, puking herself awake in an unfamiliar stairwell, a couple abortive feints toward suicide, an inadvisable self-administered haircut. She shoulders one indignity after the next as the punching bag of a cruel, capricious god, though that higher authorial power also shoots her with long, unbroken closeups in worshipful thrall to her prowess as performer. (Not to mention the line from her character’s lover about his pronounced fondness for her exceptional derriere.)
Pugh’s greatest tribulation of all is delivering the tin-eared dialogue torn between the emotional sadism it heaps onto its protagonist and the adulation it lavishes on the actress playing her. This dissonant notion of torment as tribute squares with a film intent on breaking Allison down so that it might build her back up again, her heaving pain the cost of being truly, fully alive.
In this pairing of an immensely talented actor with a minimally talented director, she brings Braff closer than ever to realizing his dream of a movie comprised entirely of climaxes, all rock-bottom nights of the soul and soaring salvation. Her skill also lays bare the limitations of Braff’s brutalizing approach, illustrating that his motivational-poster koans of hurt and healing ring even falser when spoken credibly.
Braff returns to his home of New Jersey, depicted once again as a purgatory externalizing depression with its drabness, though he borrows much more than the Garden State from 2004’s Garden State. That film’s distrust of mood-altering medication has been updated to a more well-founded wariness of painkillers, both with a numbing isolation articulated through the absurd insufficiency of a pamphlet meant to save your life. (Pugh also does her version of Natalie Portman‘s wiggly dance, in Braff’s estimation the purest expression of un-self-conscious womanly wonder.)
This time around, the formative trauma setting our sad sack on the path toward oblivion takes the form of a traffic accident that claims the lives of Allison’s soon-to-be sister- and brother-in-law. Enabled by her wine-slugging, jelly-spined mother (Molly Shannon), Allison develops a dependency on pills within the year both because they’re habit-forming, and in the deeper narrative sense that often supersedes actual logic around here, because she can’t forgive herself. Enter Morgan Freeman, still the voice of God to many viewers in Pugh’s millennial peer group; battling some demons of his own, he runs into Allison at a meeting and figures it can’t be coincidence that the woman responsible for his daughter’s death has found him.
Playing with explicitly symbolic model trains in his basement and bonding with his orphaned granddaughter (Celeste O’Connor, doing her best with a collection of plot points wearing the skin of a human girl) will snap Allison out of her self-destructive funk, a soundtrack full of whispery indie cuts stuck in the early aughts helping her along. But Allison also makes her own kind of music and sings her own special song, as Pugh revives her long-dormant pre-fame singer-songwriter career with tunes she’s penned and performed, accompanying herself on piano. While she possesses a pleasingly dusky nightclub voice, these scenes put her ample abilities to grating use, just as her bone-deep actorly conviction has been made to launder a maudlin and mawkish redemption arc.
Dispelling the image of a woman held hostage by her beau’s vanity project, Pugh (also a producer on the picture) has been vocal about the pride she takes in this film while working the media circuit, a courtesy we learned she doesn’t automatically pay during the Don’t Worry Darling press cycle. And it’s understandable, in that the role custom-made for her provides the spotlit chance to show her stuff that all thespians dream of. But ultimately, she gives too much to a film that demands everything of the people making and watching it. The relentless pummel of pathos wants to break our hearts, making the fatal presumption that we were in love from the start, too.
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ANTICIPATION.
Loyal Braff auteurists number few and far between. 2
ENJOYMENT.
The sturdy cast almost sells it. Almost! 2
IN RETROSPECT.
Nowhere to go from here but up. 1
Directed by
Zach Braff
Starring
Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman, Celeste O’Connor
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