Blue Car – Poetry and Stark Reality

Article first published as Movie Review: Blue Car – Poetry and Stark Reality on Blogcritics.

Blue Car (2002) could easily have been nothing more than a cheesy after school special. The beautiful, but troubled, Megan (Agnes Bruckner) is trying to deal with her parents divorce, her absent mother, Diane (Margaret Colin), handing over the responsibility for her distressed little sister, Lily (Regan Arnold), and all the trials and tribulations of being a teenager. The home life is less than pleasant, and there’s a clear lack of a father figure in Megan’s life. Her mother is clearly bitter about the divorce, and as so often seems to be the case, the children wind up casualties in on the harsh battlefield of the divorce.

Megan’s English teacher, Mr. Auster (David Strathairn) takes an interest in Megan, and specifically in her budding poetic talent. She takes to the attention with all the shy awkwardness of a teenager without a sure mooring. It’s one of those things where you as a viewer, find yourself thinking about the very precarious balance of early adolescence. Mr. Auster actually comes across as a pretty good guy for a while, a father figure by proxy, someone who pays attention to young Megan and listens to her, and offers support and a ride home when she’s missed the bus. Nothing is ever that simple, though.

The adults in this particular narrative all fail Megan. Megan’s mother isn’t negligent, but she is demanding and trying to get by while dealing with her own emotions about the divorce and trying to get a better job to make more money to support her two daughters. Lily, the youngest, is not dealing very well with what is happening, but she seems too young to really be as troubled as she is. Lily cuts herself with scissors, ties herself up when she goes to sleep and finally stops eating, all of this inspired by some hunger strike she has read about. Lily wastes away until she winds up in the hospital and finally jumps out of a window thinking she is an angel so her wings should carry her. This leave Megan with not only the turbulence caused by the divorce, but also the crippling guilt of thinking she could have done something to prevent it.

Through all this, Mr Auster is the only one providing any kind of emotional support for Megan. That is, until the subtle line between admiration and platonic inspiration turns sexual. Megan wins a local poetry contest and is offered the opportunity to compete nationally and she goes, despite her mother being so dead set against the idea that she throws Megan out. Megan has no money to even buy a ticket and she goes to her friend from school who’s brother is just out of prison. The brother quickly spots an innocent he can use in Megan, which he summarily does, enlisting Megan’s help in stealing drugs at a local pharmacy.

After having tricked Megan into stealing, the brother then summarily rips off his entire family and disappears, emptying Megan’s wallet of what little content it actually has.

Despite all this Megan manages to make to Florida, where the contest is held, and she sleeps on the beach waiting for the day of the contest. On the morning of the big event she runs into Mr Auster, his wife (Frances Fisher) and son on the beach. The viewer gets a succinct glimpse into the Auster family dynamic and it’s clearly not all the way healthy.

As if all this wasn’t enough, Mr Auster then proceeds to seduce Megan, bringing her to a cheap motel and taking her to bed. She never says no, despite him asking her several times if she’s okay, but it’s fairly obvious to the viewer that this is not how things were supposed to go.

The thing about this particular story is that Megan is very much a victim of her circumstance and she makes an alarming amount of bad decisions, but she does it in that volatile state of young adolescence where consequence seem hard to predict. You can read Mr Auster as a predator if you like, but there are enough layers in this that you can also see him as a character with murky motives that may-or-may-not be all that clear to himself.

If this had been handled differently, if the actors had not been as skilled as they are at finding the nuisances, it would have amounted to nothing more than lurid cheap thrills and yet another movie about a troubled youth gone astray. Of course it’s annoying that every movie about a young woman coming of age has to have this veneer of victimization, but in a way that seems inevitable. I think Megan holds her own pretty well all things considered. She’s not completely without resources and that makes all the difference.

I recommend this because it isn’t as simple as it first seems and because of the really excellent depth of character portrayed by all actors in this. There’s meat there and not just poetry and that makes it worth watching.

Blue Car (2002) directed by Karen Moncrieff stars Agnes Bruckner (Megan Denning), David Strathairn (Mr. Auster), Magaret Colin (Diane), Frances Fisher (Delia), A.J. Buckley (Pat), Regan Arnold (Lily), Sarah Buehler (Georgia), Dustin Sterling (Rob), Wayne Armstrong (Don) and Michael Joseph Thomas Ward (Dad).

The Dead Girl

The Dead Girl (2007) directed by Karen Moncrieff stars Toni Collette as Arden, Piper Laurie as Arden’s mother, Giovanni Ribisi (Rudy), Rose Byrne (Leah), James Franco (Derek), Bruce Davidson (Leah’s father), Mary Steenburgen (Leah’s mother), Brittany Murphy (Krista) Josh Brolin (Tarlow), Kerry Washington (Rosetta), Marcia Gay Harden (Melora).

This is a very complicated and carefully told story that unfolds in five chapters. It starts when Arden finds the body of a dead girl in a field in the rural landscape where she lives with her mother. Arden tells the police and becomes a local celebrity which leads to her being asked out on a date by Rudy who works in a grocery store. Arden is played beautifully as someone who is caught in a stifling and cruel relationship with her ailing mother. She breaks free from that and leaves with Rudy.

The next chapter shows Leah, the morgue attendant who is living with the pain of a missing sister, and the effects of that. The story here is about how the various family members are trying to deal with having had the older daughter gone missing without any resolution. They don’t know if she is alive or dead and they don’t know what happened to her. Leah, who is deeply depressed, just wants it all to be over. Through a series of circumstance she believes the dead girl is her sister and that almost frees her until she finds out she was wrong.

The third chapter deals with a woman whose husband goes away on long road trips and the infected, seriously twisted relationship between husband (Nick Searcy) eventually leads to the wife discovering a storage locker where her absentee husband keeps trophies in the form of bloody clothes and jewellery and things of that nature. The wife (Mary Beth Hurt) understands that her husband is a killer and she has to deal with that knowledge somehow.

The fourth chapter shows the mother of the dead girl, Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) trying to understand what happened to her daughter, finding out where she lived, that she worked as a prostitute and that she has a daughter. She works through all this and decides to take care of her granddaughter.

The last chapter shows the dead girl herself, Krista, and her last day. She comes across as a damaged soul in a lot of ways, but she is also stronger than you would think at a first glance, and the viewer gets to see some of that too.

It’s so rare to see a film that actually features women in this way. We’re talking beautiful talent, skilled work and honed dialogue showing actual women as opposed to Barbie dolls, with hard choices to make portrayed with all the depth and fullness that these wonderful ladies are capable of. That alone makes this worth watching. In some ways they are all victims and they all rise above, change their lives and move through the world as best they can.

It’s told in inverted order and without sentimentalism. It’s absolutely fascinating and gut-clenching to watch a performance like Mary Beth Hurts and seeing her make the wrong choice, seeing how poisoned her thinking is from what must be a long and deeply infected relationship. It is a movie about human interaction and all the ways in which women can get caught in bad circumstance just as much as it is a movie about a murder.

Complex, intelligent and completely engrossing without any kind of moral soapbox action this movie gives the manifold leading ladies a chance to show their skills.

How did this movie not win more awards?

Mule