SherryBaby
When a movie makes you wanna yell, “Don’t!” at its main character … that’s one of the many stupid little things that cinema is all about for me, and several of those moments occur during this one. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character Sherry is one of those movie characters you wind up wanting to fight into accepting a pure loving hug – and you better expect a fight. She reminds me of Vincent Gallo in Buffalo ‘66 – so much wrong, but so much to save. In other words, so human.
I expected this movie to be far more painful than it turns out to be – people have complained about the predictability of the characters and the story, and for most of the duration all I could think was that this predictability was almost one of the movie’s strengths, I felt certain it was doomed, like something like Niagara, Niagara, to end in tears (not that I wasn’t crying like almost all the way through), but the ending really blew me away by its innocent simplicity and optimism. I tend to kind of crave the downer kind of movies in cinema, but only yesterday I wrote about how the misery of Children of Men felt to me like I needed to be careful what I wished for. SherryBaby has no such failings. It has more than its share of pain and sorrow, for sure, and Sherry herself is no angel (understatement of the year), but it has that crucial streak of humanity that is so necessary alongside the despair.
I came to it for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s performance, and I still believe she deserves an Oscar for this just as I’ve been blind predicting ever since I heard about the movie, it’s this year’s Junebug if you want another comparison; but I think it would be a great film with or without her, and that’s something I wasn’t expecting. It’s raw, personal, uncomfortable, real, and all the more beautiful for being those things. Next to Little Children, by far one of the best movies I’ve seen all year.
January 29th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
[...] In the end, this movie is all a little too inconsequential to me, but hey, I’m no dom/sub (well, not much …). However, it is worth watching for two of the strangest performances of all time. Maggie Gyllenhaal is miles away from any other role she’s done – comparing her here to her appearance in last year’s SherryBaby is nearly as good an acting tutorial as comparing Russell Crowe in Gladiator to the Crowe of The Insider – while James Spader almost obliterates his self entirely, creating a persona somewhere between Robert Downey Jr. and Rik Mayall (just look at some of the faces he pulls in his first scene) with a little Kevin Spacey from Swimming … truly, his performance here deserves as much praise as Gyllenhaal’s, I personally didn’t know who to keep my eyes on more. [...]
February 5th, 2007 at 1:37 am
[...] SherryBaby Laurie Collyer [...]
April 18th, 2007 at 3:12 am
[...] Rachel McAdams really deserves kudos for bringing such a relatively simple character to life as well as she does – it’s one we really don’t see enough of in movies, the kind of role actresses talk about all the time on the chatshows, and I don’t think I’d realised quite how much I missed seeing such a character until seeing her version of it. When McAdams tells the annoying patrons of her hotel, “Shove it up your ass,” at the end, I don’t think that phrase has ever stood for so much – she deserves that moment so much it’s incredible – the way, before that, she spends at least 10 minutes (and this in a movie that barely breaks 70 of ‘em) checking that everyone else is okay – like, literally, everyone – even though it’s evident she is ready to break down after what she’s been through, everyone else comes first. Like I said, she’s a girl who gets shit done. Okay, I’m not gonna try putting the movie as a whole on such a high pedestal, but Rachel McAdams, definitely, is up there with Katie Holmes in Pieces of April, Maggie Gyllenhaal in SherryBaby, Helen Hunt in As Good as It Gets, Jodie Foster in … everything … y’know … I know some of those names won’t trigger the same admiration in others, but what I’m saying is, just the great female characters in movies, think of your faves, she’s up there, I promise. I think so anyway. I’m gushing now, I should stop. [...]