Mark Reviews Movies: AMERICAN WOMAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 13, 2019

A young woman—a mother, a daughter, a niece, a granddaughter—disappears, and somehow, life continues. That's the premise of American Woman, which seems to begin in the mold of a thriller or an examination of unbearable grief but eschews such simplistic and/or obvious paths.

Brad Ingelsby's screenplay is wise about the ways in which people are never really done grieving, no matter how much time may pass. The sadness and the pain may feel as if they have faded, but that's only because they become a part of who a person is. We can either give into it, stalling or giving up, or move on from it, as they say, which is probably more accurately described as allowing life to become a distraction. The film isn't quite as bleak as that thought, although it is fairly bleak in more subtle ways.

Here, we follow Debra (Sienna Miller), a woman who begins the story in her 30s as the mother of the late-teenaged Bridget (Sky Ferreira) and the grandmother of her daughter's infant son. The three live together in the same house, at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac, which is only a metaphor for their lives if we want to turn it into one. Ingelsby and director Jake Scott have no desire to transform these characters into romantically tragic figures, whose existences can be summed up by the fact that they live at the edge of a dead-end street. There is too much real tragedy, both of the obvious and the routine varieties, to indulge in such allegory.

This is a film of real details—sometimes normal, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes optimistic, and always, somehow, all of those things. Debra, for example, lives across the street from her older sister Katherine (Christina Hendricks), which suggests, as the characters more or less state outright, that these are people who have lived their entire lives in or near the same neighborhood—possibly even the same block.

There's some tension between the sisters, because, at the start, Katherine is married to the big-hearted Terry (Will Sasso) and has children, while Debra had her daughter as a teenager, has never married, and is currently having an affair with a married man. It's important in defining their relationship, but none of it really matters, because these two and their families love and trust each other enough to leave the front door unlocked as an open invitation to come in and vent or gossip or mourn whenever they need to.

None of that early conflict matters at all, though, when Bridget, after going out to dinner with her son's young and uninvolved father Tyler (Alex Neustaedter), doesn't come home. The cops are called. Debra accuses Tyler of being involved, either being honest or making up a story about how the kid abused her daughter in the past. A search party is formed. Posters and fliers are put up around town.

Debra, already a heavy drinker and feeling alone, goes out to confront her lover, who promised to spend time with her, and upon realizing that she means nothing to him or even to the man's wife, she lets go of the steering wheel of her car on a dark forest road. Somehow, she walks away from the wreckage. The smoke from the crash rises up behind Debra as she walks, determined, toward an uncertain future.

At this point, Ingelsby entirely circumvents whatever expectations or predictions we might have had for how this story would proceed. The obvious path, of course, would be that Debra, now more resilient and past some feeling of self-destruction, goes on to mount a search on her own, as some kind of race-against-the-clock thriller. A less obvious path would be that the mother realizes the full extent of what has happened, and the rest of the story is about her immediate grief. Perhaps Bridget's fate would be revealed, or maybe it wouldn't. The answer or the lack of one would serve as the point at which Debra is allowed to come to terms with the finality of knowing or the uncertainty of not knowing.

Instead, the story jumps ahead a few years, without any immediate text or dialogue explaining the leap. Debra has cleaned up her act (In addition to the portrayal of grief and how it becomes—not diminished—different, Miller's performance captures the character's evolution through the years in how every edge gradually dulls). The primary drama of her life now is in dating Ray (Pat Healy), a controlling man who treats their relationship like a favor from him. Her grandson (now played by Aidan McGraw), whom she now raises, has grown up a bit. Her situation with Katherine has calmed, and everyone talks less and less about Bridget, even though there are still painful reminders everywhere—pictures, a bedroom that stays as a kind of memorial, an annual recognition of her birthday.

The film isn't about Bridget's disappearance, although that certainly defines much of these characters and their relationships, as well as the third act, when the truth is revealed. It isn't even about the grieving process, although the filmmakers are wise enough to see it as a process that begins but never really has a finishing point. It's about something sadder and more realistic than some self-contained or focused drama, either about a hunt for a missing woman, a search for the truth, or some steps toward emotional resolution. There is no resolution to be had in this situation.

Debra later dates another man named Chris (Aaron Paul). The grandson grows up and becomes a teenager (now played by Aidan Fiske), as do Debra's nieces and nephews. She gets a good job. Looking at a picture of her daughter becomes less painful, and eventually, there aren't any more pictures of Bridget in obvious sight.

Life simply proceeds forward, whether or not these characters want it to or think that it should. In depicting these lives, as imperfect but improved as they are and start to become, American Woman serves as a quietly devastating portrayal of how every step forward after a loss can be simultaneously hopeful and tragic.

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