Rodrigo García
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Connections, in both directions
The buzz: Writer-director Rodrigo García has been down this road of overlapping stories before (“Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her,” “Nine Lives”), while executive producer Alejandro González Iñárritu has shown us the strengths (“Amores Perros,” “21 Grams”) and weaknesses (“Babel”) of a filmmaker playing god with his characters in stories that rely heavily on fate and coincidence.
The use of interlocking stories brings to mind the work of his executive producer, Alejandro González Iñárritu ( Amores Perros , 21 Grams , Babel ).
García may have a good movie in him; Iñárritu may have another (he once made Amores Perros).
Here she plays a mother to a heroin addict (a game Mila Kunis) in a cold turkey, tough love saga like “Ben is Back” (2018) or “Beautiful Boy” (2018).
In 2018, two were released, “Beautiful Boy” and “Ben Is Back,” and yet another premiered Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival.
Like 2018’s Beautiful Boy , another bleary saga of addiction, Garcia’s movie is interested in Molly’s physical degradation and her cyclical choices just as much as it wants to expose Deb’s psychological prison and parental regrets.
There have been memorable exceptions over the years, like Requiem for a Dream , which made its immersive dive into drug culture a harrowingly hallucinatory horror movie; Drugstore Cowboy , both candid and contemplative in its depiction of transient junkies; Rachel Getting Married , which found an exquisite balance of Chekhovian comedy and drama in the fallout from the sister of the bride’s addiction issues; or the Safdie brothers’ Heaven Knows What , a grittily textured odyssey of druggy New York street life that paid homage to the 1971 classic, The Panic in Needle Park .
The film opens like a picture book, Janet McTeer's ("Albert Nobbs") stately narration lulling us into bedtime story land as we first spy the magical world Maleficent (Isobelle Molloy) calls her home.
That begins to slowly—very slowly—change once lovely Lou enters his world, after being hired by his concerned mother ( Janet McTeer of “ Albert Nobbs ,” adding what layers she can to an underdone part) and father (played by a Charles Dance , a few degrees warmer than usual).