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THUNDER ROAD (2018)
Director: Jim Cummings Cast: Jim Cummings, Kendal Farr, Nican Robinson, Jocelyn DeBoer, Chelsea Edmundson, Macon Blair, Ammie Leonards, Bill Wise MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:32 Release Date: 10/12/18 (limited); 10/19/18 (wider) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 18, 2018 One of the rare but major joys of the movies is meeting a truly unique character. So many movies restrict their characters to types, or the only thing that sets apart a familiar character is the way an actor performs the role. In Thunder Road, writer/director/star Jim Cummings feature-length expansion of his short film of the same name, we meet a character who seems painfully familiar but also slightly unreal. Cummings' Jim Arnaud, a police officer on the verge of—or right in the middle of—a nervous breakdown, is a person who could only exist in the movies, but he also feels as if he could be living next door—the neighbor you see only on occasion but hear enough about to know that the person has a lot more going on in his or her life than you could imagine. The guy looks like a stereotype: a cop with a rigid way of moving, a certain tone and rhythm to the way he speaks, and the job-required mustache above his lip. There's a lot more to him, though, than those obvious details. We first meet him at a funeral, as he makes his way toward the front of the church to offer a eulogy for his mother. Within a couple of minutes, we're transfixed by the way that his outward appearance is both completely in line with his personality and clearly a façade to cover up everything going on his mind. He'll drop certain pieces of information throughout his speech that shatter the veneer. The speech itself seems simultaneously rehearsed and improvised. We think it might be the latter, because of the way he comes so close to tears when remembering the way his mother helped him through his dyslexia in school. It's as if he's realizing, in the moment the words come out of his mouth, just how much his mother did for him and how much she meant to him. No one's really prepared for such a loss, but Jim seems more ill-prepared than most people. Most people, though, wouldn't use this very public occasion as the time to display such private grief. That makes us think his eulogy had been completely rehearsed, and now, standing in front of his mother's coffin with the pressure of saying farewell in a public setting, Jim's emotions simply get the better of him. We also assume he prepared for the eulogy, because the centerpiece is a planned sing-along and dance to Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road"—a song his mom used to sing to him before he went to sleep. It was her favorite—all about escaping a small and lonely life for bigger things and dreams. She never had the chance to live out that song because of Jim, and that statement pretty much gets the waterworks going, too. This scene was the entirety of Cummings' short film, and it's re-created here with the same mixture of awkward humor (In the feature's version, Jim can't get the song to play on the little, pink boombox he brings with him, meaning he dances alone to music that's playing only in his head) and undeniable pain. It's raw and funny and uncomfortable, captured in a single take that's a virtuoso piece of acting from Cummings (not to mention his staging of the shot, which gets closer and closer to Jim, just as we want to keep our distance out of sympathy or pity). The rest of the film replicates that moment with a broader view of the character's life. He operates mostly on keeping up the picture of a stable man and, when that becomes impossible, saving face. He goes back to work almost immediately. His partner on the force Nate (Nican Robinson) is as supportive as he can be, but even a relationship as close as that one is tricky with someone like Jim. He's separated from his wife Roz (Jocelyn DeBoer), who's about to file for divorce, and has joint custody of their daughter Crystal (Kendal Farr), who doesn't hide her embarrassment of her father whenever she stays with him for a weekend. The story presents Jim with a series of escalating challenges, which go from the funeral, to being back on the job and handling a disorderly man in the street, to trying to be a father whose daughter might look up to him, and to arguing in a courtroom that he should retain his legal rights as Crystal's father. This setup—of Jim repeatedly facing and repeatedly failing this assortment of difficulties—could easily become repetitive, but as a screenwriter and a director, Cummings clearly knows that the central character is the film's greatest strength. Everything—all of the challenges and all of the unforced errors—serve to give us a better understanding of Jim. The character could easily be a joke, too, but as a performer, Cummings never loses sight of Jim's basic decency (He apologizes, perhaps, too often for his own or anyone else's good) and struggle with mental health issues, which are never outright stated but remain woefully apparent. We might laugh at Jim and his bungling way of handling seemingly ordinary tasks, but it's followed by a sense of guilt. For all of his flaws, he is a good man, trying his damnedest and failing, because he simply isn't prepared. It's a truly great performance and an equally great character, who seems quite pathetic at times but also elicits a surprising degree of our admiration (especially at the end, after circumstances align in tragedy, when he mostly keeps it together—"mostly" being the operative word). Thunder Road provides a fine showcase for Cummings, as a filmmaker of some sensitivity and as an actor who shows the full range of this tragic clown. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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