Archived: 25 Jan 2007 | Filed In Film Reviews
By: Robert Horton
Herald Movie Critic
The lives of teenage girls are suddenly on the movie radar screen. In "The Lizzy McGuire Movie," life is a playpen; in "Lilya 4-Ever," life is a nightmare.
The indie picture "Blue Car" steers a middle ground between these extremes of hedonism and bleakness. This is the story of high school senior Meg, given radiant life by young actress Agnes Bruckner.
Meg lives in a cramped apartment with her divorced mother (Margaret Colin) and a dreamy younger sister (Regan Arnold). She's haunted by the absence of the father who went away.
Her mother nags her, as Meg realistically bickers with her sister. But her salvation is in writing poetry, and her savior is her teacher, Mr. Auster (David Strathairn), who encourages her with intense personal attention.
Mr. Auster cuts a romantically tragic figure himself. He lost a child, his wife (Frances Fisher) is a boozy scold and he carries around what's rumored to be the manuscript of a novel in his leather binder.
If there is something inappropriate about the amount of attention Mr. Auster gives to Meg, that does not become explicit until they go to Florida for a poetry competition, which Meg has qualified for. But we can sense where things are heading before that.
This isn't "Lolita." In fact, it isn't quite like anything you'd expect. Meg is not a blandly nice, sensitive girl, and Mr. Auster is not an old goat.
Writer-director Karen Moncrieff, making her feature debut, has a remarkable sense of generosity and balance regarding these characters. Authenticity, too; the clipped conversations between Meg and her mom and sister are uncannily real.
David Strathairn, whose mournful expression and salt-and-pepper hair have decorated many a John Sayles film, gives a performance so subtle, you might not notice how complex and multilayered it is. He manages to make Mr. Auster a genuinely inspirational figure in the classroom, but fatally weak of will. It takes guts for an actor to reveal that side of himself.
It's harder to tell how much Agnes Bruckner is molding her own performance, but it doesn't matter. This actress (who was in "Murder by Numbers") is just about perfect.
"Blue Car" is definitely low key, but everything seems to fit -- the muted photography, the soundscape of songs (including a couple of evocative numbers by Lori Carson). It's understated, but it deserves to be noticed.
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