Mark Reviews Movies: PRINCESS OF THE ROW

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 26, 2020

Princess of the Row wants to be blunt and tough about its story of a 12-year-old girl, growing up in the foster system but constantly returning to her father, a military veteran who suffered a traumatic brain injury. The father calls a tent on the sidewalk of the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles his home. The daughter has rejected any place to call home that isn't with him.

It's a sad, disheartening story about love surpassing the need for safety and security, but we can see the gears moving toward hope in the screenplay by A. Shawn Austin and director Van Maximilian Carlson. There are setbacks—upsetting scenes of the father being abused or reflexively resorting to violence and of the daughter knowingly putting or unwittingly finding herself in danger—to be sure, but the final path of this story is almost guaranteed from the start.

The filmmakers have to work a little too hard to get there. When that ending does arrive, it definitely doesn't feel honest.

Alicia (Tayler Buck) has lived with a few foster families since social services took custody of her. None of them has worked out for the girl, who writes stories about a princess and a unicorn. She keeps going back to her father Beaumont (Edi Gathegi), who mostly exists in a haze, unaware of himself, his surroundings, or even his daughter. The girl stays for those moments of clarity from her father, who refuses help because he doesn't know he needs it.

Most of this story focuses on Alicia trying to escape from the neighborhood and the watchful eye of her social worker (played by Ana Ortiz) with Beaumont in tow. Things keep getting worse, from a group of guys attacking the father outside an abandoned house where they're squatting to a stay at a shelter that actually a front for some terrible activity.

The screenwriters kind of give away their eventual point in an early sequence, when Alicia stays with a successful writer (played by Martin Sheen) who encourages the girl's talent. It shouldn't matter that we know how Princess of the Row will end, but Austin and Carlson are so intent on increasing the direness of the main characters' situation that we never get a real sense of their relationship. As for that ending, it also includes a clichéd "final smile" that rings manipulative and false.

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