Still Backblogging

#2: Trucker

This is one of those quiet, slow, independent films that remind me of the kinds of films that Miramax released in the late 1980's before Tarantino landed there and way before the Weinsteins sold the label to Disney. The kinds of independent films spoofed by Robert Downey Jr. in the fake movie trailers in Tropic Thunder.

In this film, the hardened, free spirited, trucker (who looks like no trucker you've ever seen and clearly is not living on a diet of Mt. Dew)is forced to acknowledge, and ultimately embrace, her feminine side when her dying ex husband leaves their 11 year old child with her. In many ways this is a fairly predictable film; the trucker has built a life that allows her fierce independence and isolates her from any real human contact. The freedom of her life as an independent operator is bracketed by anonymous hook ups on the road and drunken escapades with her married (but clearly smitten) next door neighbor. But, of course, we are encouraged to see that all this independence and autonomy is really just a lame attempt to compensate for her crippling inability to cede any control to anyone else in her life. Of course, this cannot withstand the advent of a sullen 11 year old boy. Struggle, abandonment, gratuitous sexual violence (perhaps penance for flaunting working class notions of propriety), epiphany and closure as a now-full-woman-with-adult-responsibilities to follow.

Michelle Monaghan plays the lead and she does a fine job suggesting a depth of character not necessarily in the material. Her acting makes both her initial isolation and subsequent transformation ambiguous. Something in her body language makes it seem possible that she could spin off the rails at any moment. But the film does not require this of her and gives her little opportunity to do so.

Overall, this film is not bad. It actually has a narrative arc and the cinematography is evocative although, honestly, the visual metaphor of the isolation of life on the road, always moving through scenery but separated from it as an observer through the windshield, is fairly trite. It feels like a film that was written, rather than tested, and the characters mostly talk and act like real people. If that is good or bad is, I suspect, a matter of taste.