Toronto Film Review: 'Strange Weather'
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) - Holly Hunter is one of those erstwhile Hollywood leading women -- like, say, Jill Clayburgh or Debra Winger -- whose name provokes a certain wistfulness, because there's no good reason why they stayed at the top such a short while. That is, none beyond the industry's infamously short attention span toward most female stars, who generally get shunted to the B list at an age where almost any other career would just be getting established. Those who miss the spunky, rueful, heart-of-gold Hunter from her early signature films will find something of a return to that form in "Strange Weather."
Yet while her character here does indeed feel like a flintier older version of the plucky scrabblers she once played, writer-director Katherine Dieckmann's latest doesn't provide material remotely in the league of "Broadcast News," "Raising Arizona" or even "Home for the Holidays." This earnest but labored drama charts a grieving mother's search over a few days' course to explain her only child's suicide. That's a potent theme, but the mix of Southern, road flick, and parental-revenge cliches applied to it create an air of holding-back-the-tears contrivance the film never fully escapes. Worse, it makes Hunter seem like she's recycling old performances into an inferior, misguided new receptacle -- it's like watching "Miss Firecracker" pour all her li'l-dynamo shtick into filigreeing the finer points of depression.
"You're so tough and funny and so damn smart!" gushes Byrd (Carrie Coon) at bestie Darcy Baylor (Hunter) -- as if both film and thesp haven't already been hammering those qualities home for an hour. Everybody in the world, it seems, thinks self-described Mississippi "free spirit" Darcy is the cat's meow, not least the requisite local-bar-owning sexy grizzled boyfriend (Kim Coates) who waits patiently for her to un-break-up with him. But the university administrative staffer has had little use for love, or life in general, since son Walker took his life seven years ago. The reasons for that act have remained exasperatingly unclear, but Darcy thinks she's found a possible cause when she realizes a rich twerp who was the boy's college friend stole Walker's entire business plan. Kevin Jenkins (Turner Crumbley) now owns a successful hot dog restaurant franchise that he promotes in smarmy TV commercials -- ones that borrow even Walker's own childhood memories for their bogus "personal touch."
With arm-twisting coworker Byrd riding shotgun, Darcy fires up her old Ford truck, and sets off for Kevin's corporate HQ in New Orleans. This is the kind of movie where despite the psychological urgency of our heroine's quest, she insists on taking backroads so we can savor every last drop of down-homey Southern culture. Pitstops include a visit with Glenn Headly as an over-the-top old pal; needless to say, a shocking revelation or two must be shared between Darcy and Byrd before they reach the Big Easy.
Much of this feels plain hokey, unhealed by rather theatrical dialog and a couple certified Big Speeches. Through it all, Darcy is sassy, wounded, indomitable, etc. etc. -- a tailor-made role so tightly fitted it begins to feel like a straitjacket, one that Hunter (who now sports the almost alarmingly sinewy physique of latterday Madonna) thrashes about in as if every emotion might be her last.
She's proven herself a versatile as well as charismatic performer in such unexpected vehicles as "The Piano" (her Oscar winner), where she proved just as expert with silent restraint as rambunctiousness. But this return to the seriocomic Southern comfort food style of the Beth Henley texts that first made her name -- an idiom Massachusetts-born Dieckmann does not inhabit convincingly -- brings out her most obvious, crowdpleasing smiling-through-tears instincts. It's the kind of bravura turn that feels like an acting-class demonstration of "authenticity."
With support parts (including Crumbley's stock yuppie-scum) even more patly conceived, there's not much beyond pretty scenery and forced "grittiness" to distract from the hollow histrionics at the heart of "Strange Weather," whose clumsy signifiers include being set during a long, hot drought. There's no free-at-last rain dance for Darcy, but just about every other "lyrical" cliche appears on cue.
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