The fact-based story here is compelling and astonishing: the saga of a young woman who survives not only a horrific parent — a pathological liar and toxic “entrepreneur” — but her own dangerous detour into life on the streets, before achieving an epiphany that helps her not only survive, but thrive.
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| Jennifer (Dylan Penn), determing to reform her deadbeat, unreliable father (Sean Penn), moves in with him and undertakes a serious makeover effort. |
Scary thought.
Director Sean Penn clearly intended this as a showcase for his actress daughter, Dylan, and she does her old man proud; her persuasive, deeply moving performance is all over the emotional map. We grieve for her character. Repeatedly.
Too bad Dylan’s old man didn’t return the favor.
As director, Sean Penn’s aggressively arty “style” pretty much destroys this film. His unrelenting, tight-tight-tight close-ups and up-the-nostrils angles are insufferable, and he relies on them throughout the entire film. It’s the ultimate insult: the lazy, TV-soap-opera affectation of a director who doesn’t trust his actors to carry a given moment.
Penn also favors jittery camerawork — I wondered if cinematographer Daniel Moder had been ordered to bounced on a trampoline — and often detours into blurry, grainy, 16mm “memory moments” intended to mimic sloppy home movies.
Just about every time Dylan Penn hits a crucial dramatic scene, her father steals focus by calling too much attention to his self-indulgent directorial tics and hiccups.
It’s an impressive job of sabotage … which is pretty damn ironic. How could he not have realized that he was ruining his own daughter’s fine work?
After a brief prologue in the early 1990s — which telegraphs the story’s conclusion — we’re introduced to the dysfunctional Vogel family: father John (Sean Penn), wife Patty (Katheryn Winnick) and adolescent children Jennifer (Jadyn Rylee) and Nick (Beckam Crawford). The adult Jennifer (Dylan Penn) narrates the details of their tempestuous upbringing, highlighting the degree to which John’s chronic unreliability exacerbates Patty’s fragile insecurity.
It’s the mid-1970s. John blows what little money he makes on flamboyant gestures, and then can’t make rent or put food on the table. Patty knows it’s just a matter of time before they’ll once again throw all their worldly possessions into the beat-up station wagon, and drive to some other Midwestern town, where John will somehow con their way into another short-term home.
