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SherryBabyIf there had been any justice in the 2006-7 Oscar nominations, Maggie Gyllenhaal would have found herself opposite Half Nelson's Ryan Gosling for their revelatory his 'n' hers performances as floundering drug addicts trying to reconnect themselves to life via a young charge. As it was, Gosling made the cut, Gyllenhaal didn't - an indication of the important distinction between SherryBaby the movie, and the performance that dominates it.
SherryBaby is Maggie Gyllenhaal as Sherry Swanson, a peroxide, loose-limbed recovering heroin addict just out of a three-year jail sentence. Released into a halfway house, rigidly monitored by her parole officer (Esposito), Sherry craves not so much smack, as reconnection with the infant daughter Lexi (Simpkins) she left behind.
Lexi has been cared for by Sherry's gentle giant brother Bobby (Henke) and his wary wife Lynette (Barkan), who has mixed feelings about Sherry's return. And with Sherry quickly confirming her own petulant, willful immaturity, it's easy to see why. The "baby" tag to the title is apt; Sherry's still a kid herself at heart, albeit one in the scantily clad body of a horny teenager and with the abrasive front formed by constantly rubbing up against the world around her.
It's quite a role and Gyllenhaal nails it from the beginning, fearlessly exposing herself both physically and emotionally, never shirking Sherry's unsympathetic traits. She's a mess but her improvised, self-destructive path initially lends the film a welcome, unpredictable energy.
Writer-director Laurie Collyer has cast the film exceptionally well so that, despite Gyllenhaal's dominance, supporting characters are adeptly sketched in. In particular there's a surprisingly effective turn from hatchet-faced Danny Trejo, usually cast as your standard Hispanic hoodlum/hired killer/hard case, here in a fully-rounded role as a frisky, straight-talking drug counselor.
Collyer's background in documentary filmmaking and her skill at connecting characters to their environment is useful here, as well as a keen ear for naturalistic dialogue that never gets preachy, despite the potentially finger-wagging subject matter. A late, deeply disturbing family revelation offers a tantalizing glimpse into Sherry's psychological fault lines but isn't used to justify or excuse her behaviour, only help us understand her.
These strengths make the film's dramatic timidity even more disappointing. For all the determination for US 'indie' films (whatever that now means) to avoid prescriptive, neatly resolved Hollywood narrative, so many of them seem automatically to default into an equally cliched, open-ended storytelling. If you can't predict, almost scene-for-scene, where SherryBaby is headed, you simply haven't watched a movie featured at the Sundance Film Festival in your life.
The best of these types of movies, generally character studies of damaged souls - Half Nelson, Keane - manage to get under the skin of their protagonist and the narrative itself. For all its commendable care and attention, SherryBaby knocks back the first, thanks to Gyllenhaal's immense efforts, but not the second, contentedly glugging on patented "anti-Hollywood" formula all the way to Utah.
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