52 Films by Women Vol 2. 32. STRANGE WEATHER (Director: Katherine Dieckmann)
Writer-director Katherine Dieckmann (A Good Baby, Diggers, Motherhood) has a mission: to make films
centred on women aged 40 plus. It isn’t just that Hollywood neglects this
demographic but actresses like Ellen Barkin and Debra Winger are relegated to
supporting roles once they reach the big Four-whoa! First item of business: Strange Weather, a drama about the
search for truth and justice by a grieving divorcee, University Administrator, Darcy
Baylor, played by the estimable Holly Hunter, a name to enunciated in boxing
commentator terms - ‘presenting in the blue corner, multiple Academy Award
nominee, winner of one Oscar, the one, the only Hollllllleee Hunnnn-tuh!’
OK, maybe after the first time, it would lose its novelty.
But try enunciating Meryl Streep that way - it sounds like a deflating balloon.
Seven years ago, Darcy’s son committed suicide. When Darcy
discovers that his business plan, the one she helped type up and gave him the
inspiration for, god damn it, has been used by a classmate, Mark Wright (Shane
Jacobson) to form the basis of a hot dog eatery business, Good Dawg, valued at
$5 million, she wants answers. What happened on the evening he died whilst she
worked late and was unable to intervene?
This isn’t the first film directed by a woman to focus on a
suicide – the theme was recently explored in British director Hope Dickson
Leach’s The Levelling (number 28 in
this series). Strange Weather
takes place during a South Georgia heatwave, 88 days of no rain, just summer
lightning. The authorities have restricted the use of hosepipes, meaning that
Darcy and her neighbour, Byrd Ritt (Carrie Coon, from the current series of Fargo) have to water their garden at
night, away from prying eyes. They decide to go on a long ol’ road trip, taking
in a visit to an old school friend, Mary Lou (Glenne Headly), Darcy’s enfeebled
ex-husband, Wes (Johnny McPhail) and one of her son’s college mates, Buford
LaPierre (Craig Boe) whose family are caught up in the devastation of a
post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Byrd wants Darcy to reconnect with the
world – seven years is a lot of spent grief – but she isn’t keen on the gun in
Darcy’s (as opposed to Mary Lou’s) handbag. She didn’t sign up for ‘violent
intentions.’ For her part, Darcy gives her some reassurance.
Strange Weather isn’t
the first film set during a long hot summer – there was the 1958 Paul Newman
picture entitled, erm, The Long Hot
Summer. Excessive temperatures are normally the backdrop for steamy film
noirs like The Postman Always Rings
Twice, Body Heat and The Hot Spot. Dieckmann
has intentionally and decisively made a road movie about two friends who have a
platonic relationship. Byrd has a lesbian partner, Geri (Andrene Ward-Hammond)
but the running joke is that Darcy thinks Geri might be dabbling. After all, as
Darcy unexpectedly discovers, Byrd has seen her son’s birthmark, and she wasn’t
child-minding. This comes as part of the big speech: ‘you’re not the only one
who cared about your son’. She wasn’t the only one who couldn’t stop him using
the handgun that his daddy had bequeathed to him, either.
Dieckmann rewrites the genre playbook from the start. She
shows Darcy involved in an on-off relationship with a barman – they do have
steamy, middle-aged, grab-and-go sex – but the scene is over and done with to
throw sex out of the window - get your genre elements over with quick. Darcy’s
conversations with women tend to be non-confrontational, notably abiding by
Mary Lou’s ‘no smoking in the condo’ rule (‘it saddens me that you do that’, Mary
Lou adds). Darcy’s conversations with Wes and Buford are tense. Wes is
incapable of saying a word. He is framed in a tight close-up with Darcy trying
to squeeze the last drop of comprehensible speech from his near-dry face. Wes
doesn’t speak but his dormant volcanic face yields a solitary drip of lava, a
single tear. Buford fights to get this old lady (Darcy) out of his face. He
doesn’t have to talk to her but he mentions the carton of bullets that her son
had access to and how he got them.
Dieckmann is great on revealing detail, how Darcy cools
herself in a store refrigerator whilst shopping – an old lady, another shopper,
smiles at her. We see the effects of uneven water distribution, with flooding
blocking one road, whilst other communities run dry. Then there is the issue of
proving Mark appropriated her son’s plan – she gets her son’s proposal,
rejected by his teacher – but then she has go dumpster-hunting.
Hunter is electric in a role that she seizes with relish.
Hers is a physical performance – she works the telling gesture, the way she
part rests on a surface or drags one leg. She has a dancer’s physicality and
pumps props. On the minus side, as Dieckmann revealed, she doesn’t do
continuity. Holly won’t do the same thing twice, just what is right and in the
moment. She’ll play with the delivery too.
Darcy looks for justice and settles for truth. This isn’t
exactly a spoiler. You can’t really find an equivalent for the loss of a child.
Hunter has a good foil in Coon. Her Byrd is extremely grounded to the point
that when the trip gets into its final stretch, she knows what her place is.
The point of Strange
Weather is that it isn’t Thelma and
Louise or Mortal Thoughts, which
also starred Headly. Does every woman-led road movie with a gun have to be so
determinedly transgressive, so keen to redress balances? Can balances even be
redressed? It is a gripping and entertaining film with a coda – education is
important and can help actualise a person’s potential rather than just be
letters after a name. The characters’ actions aren’t driven by genre requirements
but come naturally out of the situation.
The only misjudgement is ‘strange’ in the title, as if a
heatwave is determinedly abnormal. Heavy
Weather would be a better title but might be one of those movies that
reviews itself.
Reviewed at Edinburgh
International Film Festival, Saturday 1 July 2017, 20:55 screening, Cineworld
Edinburgh (Fountainbridge) in the presence of the director
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