“Acidman,” a new family drama starring Thomas Haden Church and Dianna Agron and now playing in theatres, is a quiet, and sometimes disquieting, essay on a broken father and daughter relationship.
Maggie (Dianna Agron), a thirtysomething engineer on the verge of divorce, hasn’t had much contact with her father Lloyd (Church) a.k.a. Acidman, for decades, ever since he abandoned his career and family when she was a teen.
A reclusive, he lives rough, in a rundown trailer in the Pacific Northwest. “It’s a good place to be left alone,” he says. When he isn’t writing and recording discordant industrial music using the junk that fills his place as instruments, he is attempting to make first contact with UFOs. “Technically,” he says, “they are IFOs because we’ve identified them.”
Maggie travels thousands of miles by plane, train and automobile to reconnect with her father, to check in on him—“When is the last time you went to the doctor?”—and to gain some understanding of his reasons for leaving her behind. In understanding his abandonment, she also hopes to gain some clarity on her dissolving marriage.
“How long are you planning on staying,” Lloyd asks. “I guess I could have picked up a little, if I had known you were making the trip.”
As they get reacquainted on UFO sighting trips with Lloyd’s dog Migo, Maggie comes to realize the depth of her father’s alienation, but finds cracks in his hardened veneer that reveal the man she once knew.
“Acidman” is the study of a relationship in progress. Lloyd and Maggie are strangers, tied by biology and faded memories.
Their tentative attempts at making a true connection are poignantly played by Argon and Church. There isn’t an ounce of sentimentality on display, just two broken people searching for a path forward. This isn’t a story where the characters emerge at the end of the movie radically changed. Instead, the way they grapple with the past, pushes them into the future.
Director Alex Lehmann keeps things simple. The melodrama is on the downlow, which allows the chemistry between the two lost souls in the leads develop slowly and naturally until their fractured relationship finds its comfort zone. It’s an intimate two-hander that takes patience from the viewer, but pays off with a feeling of gentle authenticity.
Look the word hardscrabble up in the dictionary and you’re likely to find a picture of “Hollow in the Land’s” Alison Miller (Dianna Agron). She lives in the kind of backwater industrial town where everyone knows her business. And there’s a lot to talk about. Her father is locked up, jailed for an alcohol fuelled crime spree that ended in the death of the son of the local mill owner.
Mom is a long distant memory, having run off, leaving Alison to care for her teenage brother Brandon (Jared Abrahamson). He’s a handful. “You know one of these days you’re going to do some real damage, smart ass,” a local cop (Michael Rogers) tells him when he’s picked up for fighting, “and you’ll have bigger problems than some paperwork. You’ll be sharing a cell with your old man in no time.”
When the neighbours aren’t talking about the Miller’s troubled family history they’re gossiping about Alison and her girlfriend Charlene (Rachelle Lefevre).
Alison’s life is further scrutinized when Brandon lands in deep trouble. The day after his girlfriend Sophie’s violent, drunken father (John Sampson) walked in on them having sex, the old man winds up dead and Brandon is the chief suspect. Convinced of his innocence she launches her own investigation only to wind up under the microscope herself.
“Hollow in the Land” is more of a snapshot of life in a small town than it is a murder mystery. The procedural aspects of the story are less interesting than the characters, which are brought to vivid, scrappy life. Agron, best known as high school cheerleader Quinn Fabray on “Glee,” brings grit to Alison, playing her as determined yet emotionally damaged.
“Hollow in the Land” will be compared to the equally grungy “Winter’s Bone.” Like that movie writer-director Scooter Corkle paints a drab picture of life in this town, creating a backwoods neo-noir with some nice details, but never really satisfies narratively.
“Novitiate,” the new drama from director Margaret Betts, is a story of love, piety, obedience and sacrifice that is as tightly wound as one of Reverend Mother’s (Melissa Leo) Rosaries.
Cathleen (played as a youngster by Eliza Stella Mason) is a just seven years old when she falls in love for the first time. Taken to church for the first time by her non-religious mother Nora (Julianne Nicholson) the little girl becomes attracted to the solemnity of the service. It’s the polar opposite of her home life where Mom and Dad (Chris Zylka) are constantly at one another’s throats. When she’s offered a chance to attend Catholic school for free Cathleen jumps at the chance despite Nora’s misgivings.
At the convent school Cathleen (played by Margaret Qualley from age seventeen on) finds the life she was always unable to enjoy at home. Under the watchful eye of Reverend Mother the teenager decides to give herself over to the church, become a nun and devote herself to the worship and servitude of God.
“That’s the craziest thing I have ever heard,” comes Nora’s stunned reaction.
“I was called,” says Cathleen. “I want to become a nun and there is nothing you can do to make me change my mind.”
Her training—from postulant to the novitiate—coincides with the introduction of Vatican II, a reaction to changing cultural practises after World War II that signalled widespread changes in the church. With change afoot Cathleen determines what it means to embark on a life as a servant of God, as Reverend Mother grapples with what the changes mean to her faith.
“Novitiate” is a detailed, sombre look at the nature of faith that sometimes feels like two movies in one. Cathleen’s narrative leads the story and is the most compelling part of the film but her story of love and sacrifice is diluted by Reverend Mother’s reaction to the reformist and more-liberal-than-she’d-like Vatican II dictums. The characters are bookends but even with the two hour run time there isn’t quite enough story to dive deep into their lives and make us care about both.
Better stated are Cathleen’s quandaries. She wrangles but rarely waivers with her faith, presenting a complex look at the personal toll that comes with the gruelling novitiate process. Qualley and her supporting cast of “sisters”— Liana Liberato, Eline Powell, Morgan Saylor, Maddie Hasson and Ashley Bell—are a mosaic of characters placed together to show the various reasons the young women chose to become nuns.
Leo humanizes the severe Reverend Mother, turning her from stern mistress to a person caught in the tide of change and unable to swim.
Betts, who also wrote “Novitiate’s” script, brings nuance and thoughtfulness to most characters but as a whole the meditative mood of the movie’s two storylines never coalesce.
