Tumbleweeds
Director: Gavin O'Connor. Cast: Janet McTeer, Kimberly O. Brown, Gavin O'Connor, Jay O. Sanders, Laurel Holloman, Lois Smith, Michael J. Pollard, Cody McMains, Ashley Buccille, Noah Emmerich. Screenplay: Gavin O'Connor and Angela Shelton.
Tumbleweeds, the first feature by actor-writer-director Gavin O'Connor, finds exactly the right blowzy, candid pace and structure to tell the story of Mary Jo Walker, a Southern free spirit with a knack for meeting (and marrying) the wrong men, and Ava, the savvy preteen daughter who loves her mom but grows increasingly impatient with their series of moves and the series of abusive loser men who necessitate them. You don't have to have seen last fall's Anywhere But Here with Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman to think this story sounds familiar; obvious echoes of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore rebound through the picture. Moreover, Tumbleweeds offers yet another member of a large group of 1999 releases, including not just the Sarandon-Portman picture but also A Walk on the Moon, Limbo, and Music of the Heart that have focused at least in part on the strained but resilient relationships between headstrong, artistic single mothers and the children who both admire and resent them, often at the same time.
Thankfully, all of these pictures have featured strong performances from both the younger and older actors, and Tumbleweeds is no exception. Janet McTeer, a Golden Globe winner and current Oscar nominee for this performance, is not currently familiar to American audiences outside the lucky few who saw her in the Broadway revival of A Doll's House a few years ago. Her fine, exuberant work as Mary Jo should raise her profile significantly, which is good news for everyone. Despite the Southern accent and other precise external details required for the British actress to inhabit the part, McTeer still manages to nail Mary Jo's utter unself-consciousness, changing her dress in front of near-strangers young and old, dropping in and out of conversations as her eye or ear is caught by other objects, winning favors from people she barely knows because they cannot resist her wide-eyed, good-humored sincerity. What makes the character even more interesting, however, and what keeps Tumbleweeds from getting too predictable, is that both McTeer and the screenwriters keep in mind that unself-consciousness is not always an admirable trait. Mary Jo has a tendency toward self-absorption, or at least toward failing to grasp or even ask about the sorrows or setbacks of the people around her. She also has a tendency to pass off irresponsibility as whimsy, to rely on habitual caprice as an excuse for not questioning her own motives. Tumbleweeds doesn't make a great hew and cry of pointing out the character's shortcomings or punishing her for them—which is a relief—but nor is she ironed out into wrinkleless sainthood by picture's end, which is equally pleasing.
Kimberly J. Brown is almost as exciting to watch as her older co-star, largely because Ava is the rare adolescent on film who, though often wiser or gifted with greater foresight than her mother, is nonetheless very much a schoolgirl in important ways. She remains impetuously jealous, makes a few obvious ploys at attention-getting, and in general proves better at reading her mother and admonishing her mistakes than she is at avoiding those same mistakes herself. Rather than making Ava a girl of extreme intelligence, sullenness, confidence, or contemplation, Brown chooses the more interesting path that her script permits her of registering varying degrees of all of these qualities at different moments in the picture. Her navigation of Ada's cycles of insolence, excitement, and boredom within a single scene set in a bowling alley is indicative of the range of emotions she covers with remarkable ease throughout the movie.
I am not saying much about what happens in this picture, not because writers O'Connor and Angela Shelton stint on plot but because a major pleasure of Tumbleweeds is the surprising way in which different events arise in the characters' lives and the ways in which they confront them. Some of these scenes we have seen several times before, and some not, but at no point does Tumbleweeds intrude with the kinds of moral pronouncements or sudden character transformations that have sunk so many films in this genre. Even the plotlines we can predict do not always arise or resolve themselves when we expect, as when a promising character from the opening scenes disappears for a half-hour, re-emerging in Mary Jo's life almost at the moment when we have forgotten his first appearance. Scenes that seem headed for disaster of either comic or tragic varieties resist those obvious destinations with no sacrifice of humor or warmth. Other scenes that appear undistinguished gather considerable poignancy in a matter of moments.
Not at every moment does Tumbleweeds conceal its structural machinery or the comparative inexperience of its creators. As the picture comes to a close, we do start to hear the screenwriting gears cranking a little, and a few scenes featuring Brown, McTeer, and a potential love interest played by Jay O. Sanders (also the obligatory "nice guy" in Music of the Heart) sound a bit like excerpts from Monologues for Actors. In fact, the whole picture seemed a little more schematic to me in the hours after I saw than it actually had while I sat in the theater—just for starters, how about that surname "Walker" for the itinerant protagonists, and the even more overdetermined allusion to the Bible's paradigmatic weary, child-bearing travelers embedded in Mary Jo's name.
All the same, one of the subjects of this film is the strange patterns that present themselves when one reads carefully back into one's own past, and how paying attention to what seems like chaos or randomness can save us from inertia or, worse, from injury. In other words, finding meaning or import in what initially seemed casual or arbitrary is not just a formal circumstance of the movie; it's what the movie is about. Ultimately, Tumbleweeds registered to me as a modestly proportioned but gratifying and emotionally rich exploration of the same themes Pedro Almodóvar pursues with more visual pizzazz but some narrative overreaching in All About My Mother, a title this film could well have claimed for itself. Mary Jo and Ava, like Almodóvar's women, tend to repeat one another's mistakes and occasionally work themselves into behavior patterns or circumstances they know to be undesirable but cannot or will not alter. However, through their limitless imaginations, considerably moxie, and, above all, their extraordinary comfort and intimacy with each other, both women not only resist feeling tired or victimized but seem only rarely to imagine that they are not on top of the world. I felt much the same after watching this sensitive, embracing film. Grade: A–
- Academy Award Nominations:
- Best Actress: Janet McTeer
- Golden Globe Nominations and *Winners:
- *Best Actress (Musical/Comedy): Janet McTeer
- Other Awards:
- National Board of Review—Best Actress: Janet McTeer
- Golden Satellites—Best Actress (Musical/Comedy): Janet McTeer