depicts—illness, risky first love, drug dependency—is stuff we’ve seen on film many times before. What makes this dreamy-sad film fresh and exciting is the perspective brought to familiar material by first-time feature director, making an auspicious big-screen debut after doing impressive work in television. Murphy animates’s script—itself an inventive reimagining of cliché—with insistent artistry, announcing her arrival as an ascendant talent.
Milla’s limited life is given new possibility—and her parents’ worry is briefly retrained to that of regular old protective parents—when she meets a wayward, also drug-addled young man named Moses , who’s been kicked out of his house and is in need of money, shelter, and care. The two kids—well, she’s 16 and he’s 23, a tricky dynamic that gets some exploration in the film before it’s somewhat credibly rationalized away—embark on a kind of courtship that’s both wary and hungry.
The cast rides the film’s gentle contours with agility. Mendelsohn and Davis are reliably excellent, each taking what could be boilerplate portraits of fraying parents and turning them into vividly individual people. Henry is wrong in his clinical distance and in his loving indulgences, a conflict that Mendelsohn handles without any prescriptive moralizing. Henry is neither a good father nor a bad one; he’s just one trying to find a pragmatic way through an impossible situation.
“It’s her first love,” Anna says resignedly to Henry in one quiet scene. The unspoken sentiment is that it could also very well be her last. Is that enough to excuse the gap in age and experience?is content to dwell in an ambivalence about that, as Anna and Henry realize that giving permission to transgression is, in some sense, allowing Milla to live a whole young adulthood in a compressed, terribly fleeting time frame. Murphy is not interested in didactic lesson-learning.
Decide for yourself whether that’s mere poetic justification of a bad thing. Whatever your conclusion, I hope you’ll share in my eagerness for Murphy to do more. Now that she’s so imaginatively handled these old, heavy stones of classic drama, I hope Murphy will go exploring, seeking out odder, less traditional themes to consider with all her creative resources., Milla tags along with Moses to a clubby house party, beats thumping and lights swirling.
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