Archived: 25 Jan 2007 | Filed In Film Reviews
By: John Boonstra
Karen Moncrieff's Blue Car is built around the breakthrough performance of Agnes Bruckner as Meg, a troubled suburban teenager. She's a good kid, but her parents' divorce has hit her and her nine-year-old sister (Regan Arnold) hard. Now Mom (Margaret Colin) is never around as she scrambles to make ends meet, put herself through night school and cajole favors out of a new boyfriend. It's up to poor Meg to tend to her sister and to fend for herself. Her anguish finds expression in the poems she submits to her English teacher, Mr. Auster (David Strathairn, so good in Limbo and Dolores Claiborne ). Auster encourages her to apply to a national competition that can win her a $3,000 scholarship, and offers to help her hone her skills. Soon enough, he's the only positive aspect of her life, which just keeps disintegrating on the home front.
Few will have failed to anticipate that the student-teacher relationship is fated to develop in an inappropriately sexual direction, but writer/director Moncrieff, up from a so-so career as an actor, crosses this line slowly, matter-of-factly. Her one earlier job behind the camera was directing an episode of Six Feet Under , and that show's mix of the shocking right alongside the ordinary is very much in evidence.
The weakest link is a subplot involving the mental state of that kid sister, which ultimately feels heavy-handed. And the you-can-go-home-again resolution rings a wee bit hollow in a drama that's been so tough-minded up to that point. Still, there's no mistaking the brilliance of Bruckner's bravura turn. She's in almost every shot, conveying a bruised vulnerability that masks an innate survivor. See it for Strathairn's balancing act, for Colin as a mother who can't help being the way she is, but most of all, for Bruckner.
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