The Highway That Never Reaches Home…I admit it: I am not a girl who is particularly sensitive to feminist issues. Yes, I believe that men and women should be treated unquestionably equally, but I have never been to a female rights protest and I do not scoff at rap videos nor shake my head at beer ads. However watching The Highway Home, I felt a sense of gender piety that made me wanted to start a feminist rally on Shattuck Avenue.
SPOILER ALERT: At first glance the film The Highway Home, written and directed by Laurel Hunter, had real potential: attractive 16-year-old girl wants to rebel through cutting class, running away, and falling in love with a 20-something year-old drug dealer who she meets in a pool hall. Great. Never mind the overly abundant narration that cluttered the first 6 minutes of the film, I could look past that in the promise for sex, drugs, and scandal. However, as the seventy-minute film unfolded, it became apparent that MTV’s The Hills had more potential for action.
When we first meet the beautiful protagonist, Jamie, played by Erika Frost who makes her film debut, we have no idea how old she is yet we know she is under 21 because she tries, unsuccessfully, to convince the pool-hall bartender to serve her alcohol. Perhaps the audience might have sympathized with her more had she been clever enough to persuade him to serve her, but no, this only foreshadowed the remainder of the film throughout which she continues to do everything wrong. But, as I said, we want to want to like her, so we can overlook the fact that she is not a con artist. However, the second she sees her boyfriend-to-be, she immediately decides “she would never love anyone else again”. The set up establishes her naiveté, but unfortunately, despite her experiences, she never grows any wiser. Perhaps it was just bad acting, but the root of Jamie’s helplessness and desire to escape the “authority” of her home was entirely unclear. Frost always appeared content and even-tempered; she did not even show hostility towards her air-headed, but attentive mother. Jamie’s reaction to her slobbish, self-pitying father manifested in stealing cigarettes and smoking them while staring into the clouds. Her family did not exactly enforce strict authority and subsequently, she was not the most active rebel. In fact, the way that the mother seemed to care for and attend to her daughter made me question why Jamie did not just ask her for the $500 that Jamie needed to bail her boyfriend out of jail when he is incarcerated for possession with intent to sell acid. Jamie is so helplessly in love with her boyfriend (for no apparent reason-note that he lives in a motel and only substantial dialogue is his fantasy of committing a robbery), that she runs away from home, even though she cannot be with him.
While Hunter may have intended to portray Jamie’s attraction to a free-spirited rebel, the little interaction and even less chemistry made Jamie’s actions seem uncharacteristically rash and even somewhat random. In a desperate, immature act of rebellion, I could not help but wonder, what exactly what she was running from at home? Yes, her parents split up, but her home-life seemed reasonably benign. The only reasonable explanation for Jamie’s lack of strength is her mothers similar, weak character. Her mother suffered from (poor acting) as well as her relationship with a married man, who she inexplicably rejects when he finally leaves his wife, only to flirt with both detectives looking for her daughter, one of which ends up being a homosexual who dates her ex-husband. When Jamie finally leaves home, sleeps with a hippy stranger, lives in a house with a stoner and a women who ends up being the girlfriend of the lying hippy, Jamie ends up doing acid by herself and crashing her car.
When she wakes up she screams out for her mother who, as we already know, is just as weak and helpless as her daughter. More unfortunate than the poor acting choices and the meager dialogue, was the plot itself, that leaves Jamie right where she began, if not worse. Bloody and alone, Jamie’s cry for help epitomized her lack of character development, and her essential role as a damsel in distress. Lead blindly around by her fleeting school girl crushes that she mistakes for love, Jamie never stops to think. She is a child who never becomes a woman, but only ruins herself further, without any apparent ammunition. I find it difficult to digest the fact that a woman wrote and directed the film, seeing as the primary flaw is the weak female character who both begins and remains utterly helpless to take control of any minute detail of her life. Essentially, there is no character development, growth, or plot arch, in fact it appears to simply end in the middle, when Jamie might have some chance for redemption. The film’s redeeming qualities were occasional witty lines that referenced current events like “new age Oprah crap”, in a film that otherwise portrayed women as powerless figures who exist only impulsively and in awe of men.
by Lily Saltzberg, FilmClick.com
http://filmclick.com/lilsaltz
I also saw this film and I have some different thoughts than Ms. Saltzberg, although I agree with her review substantially, so I thought I’d add to it. I’ve been thinking about this film for a day or two before posting this review, hoping that it would all click in my mind and I would understand where the filmmaker was coming from, at least. But, I can’t make sense of it.
I’m coming to the rally. This film was like a bad 1980’s after school special. One choice leads to another for the misguided, oblivious, main character Jamie and rarely does she show any sign of awareness of her free will. I give little fault to the actors, most of whom gave adequate performances in a poorly conceived and executed script. As far as Frost’s performance, it is very one-note, but I blame the director for letting that happen. I’ve been accused of liking everything, finding value in tiny parts about a film that everyone disliked. I find little to like in this film besides the opening credits, Darren Shroader’s performance and a few out-of-the-blue one liners. On the other hand, if it was conceived as a bad 1980’s after school special, then it is totally awesome and you should check it out and laugh. Plus, you never got nudity on television back then.
I’ll speak particularly to a few points of the film. There were many things which were unrealistic, which is what this film attempts to depict, I guess. One example: one of the lead detectives investigating the main character’s run away disappearance is homosexual, a fact which is slowly revealed in the film. The main character’s mother finds out that the detective is spending time with her ex-husband and jumps to the conclusion that they’re in a homosexual relationship. I guess we can assume prior knowledge of her ex, but the filmmaker makes a point of the mother looking at the way they’re dressed when she figures it out. The depiction of homosexuality here is odd/possibly insulting, but I won’t go into that. So, the mother says that she’s going to make sure she gets custody of the daughter and that the detective gets fired. This is backed up by the homosexual detective’s partner. Admittedly, this film is set in nowhere, so maybe this stuff matters in small-town-state-that-ends-in-a-vowel and the military, but this doesn’t make sense. Unrealistic, even in the early 1990’s or whenever this film is set. Since when is being homosexual grounds for denial of custody? I also doubt that what the detective does on his own time is grounds for dismissal, despite the extenuating circumstances. The other detective is very interested in a heterosexual relationship with the mother, although he makes a point to ask her out when it is all over.
Also, in the ending of the film the main character Jamie, during an acid-induced trip, sees Christ-like visions of a man she’s slept with, which leads to her eventual demise. I can only guess that this is meant to illustrate that a godlike obsession with men has led to her downfall? If so, it gives the film an anti-male sentiment, which I have no beef with, as Jamie is taken advantage of by men in the film from a certain perspective, but it removes any blame for her actions from her as a character.
As she screams for her mother during her dying moments, I don’t care. There’s no struggle for her, no reason for me to feel pity or empathy. Her mother is portrayed as someone who does her best to help her, not someone who abandoned her or didn’t teach her right. If she screamed for her Dad, it would’ve made more sense. If she reached out to her parents, her annoying intermittent narrator/basil exposition friend at school, or anyone with her real feelings of hurt, shame, joy, it might’ve connected us to her and her journey. But, it’s not there. If this is not meant to show the real world, the filmmaker hasn’t done her job illustrating it to the audience. If this is the real world, then natural selection has done its job as Jamie fades away at the end of the film. Natural selection will do similar work to this film, I imagine.
by Christopher Potter, FilmClick.com producer
http://www.filmclick.com/cspotter
Photo courtesy of http://www.thehighwayhome.com/press-pr.04.01.08.htm
