Gateway Cinephiles

Sin Nombre
2009 (USA / Mexico)
Director: Cary Fukunaga
Viewed: April 19, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

B - Here is a simple story, familiar almost to the point of triteness. A Good Woman searching for a better life in a faraway land and a Bad Man haunted by his past meet by happenstance on the road. They bond, after a fashion, and gradually the fates of these two travelers become entwined. In Sin Nombre, the stark directorial debut from Cary Fukunaga, the Good Woman is a young Honduran named Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), heading across Latin America with her father and uncle to an uncertain, undocumented life in New Jersey. The Bad Man is a Mexican gangster known as Willy (Edgar Flores), who is fleeing the wrath of his gang after having committed the gravest of sins. The road they share is a freight train heading north, towards Estados Unidos. In most reviews, this would be the point where I suggest that the particulars don’t really matter, that Sin Nombre plumbs thematic territory that transcends its setting. Yet I can’t, in good conscience, make that claim. The Timeless Story that Fukunaga is striving for is modestly successful, hindered by occasional clumsiness and all-too-frequent contrivances. Sin Nombre’s principal appeal is firmly grounded in its specifics. The details of his setting—both sulfurous and sweet—lend the film a mythic richness that the creaky story and weakly drawn characters fail to convey.

Sin Nombre’s first shots are some of its most fascinating. I hesitate to say that the film goes downhill from there, but it is a mysterious and wondrous bit of cinematic poetry that promises a bit more than Fukunaga eventually delivers. Stretching out before us is a breathtaking autumn forest, positively glowing with scarlet leaves. The Hudson Valley perhaps? Then we see Willy, also known as El Casper, a Mexican street thug, old beyond his years already with teardrop tattoo, a smattering of scars, and a requisite “conflicted tough guy” demeanor. The relationship between Willy and the almost fantastical woodland scene is not immediately apparent. (Is it a dream? A memory?) Then the film unites the two elements: the forest is revealed to be a floor-to-ceiling landscape photo that covers one wall of Willy’s bedroom, which the young tough regards with hazy distraction. Then the reverie is broken, and Willy returns to the reality of his barrio existence. His cartel has tasked him to mentor an initiate, an eager-to-please kid named Smiley (Kristian Ferrer) who is still years from his first whiskers. However, Willy’s secret liaisons with a Nice Girl on the (literal) other side of the tracks proves to be a distraction, landing him and Smiley in hot water with their diabolical boss, Lil’ Mago (Tenoch Huerta).

Meanwhile, in Honduras, Sayra is about to set out on a grueling journey to the United States, accompanied by her uncle and a father she has not seen in ages. She exudes the silent discontent of a young woman weary of following the advice of others, but too diffident to do otherwise. Blunt and anxious, her father makes her repeat a string of numbers out loud as they trudge overland through scorching fields. This is the phone number for his New Wife, the mother of his Other Children, who dwell in distant New Jersey. It’s not clear what exactly Sayra thinks of starting over in a foreign land with these people, but she’s plainly not thrilled with the notion.

From the outset, there is zero doubt that Sayra and Willy will cross paths eventually, so the only question is whether Fukunaga handles their meeting and the eventual entanglement of their fortunes with skill. The answer is “Sort Of.”  Willy stumbles into Sayra and her family on board a freight train, where the gangster saves the woman from a grisly fate, in a character reversal that is both ridiculous and completely understandable. Given that Sin Nombre is, in essence, a romantic tragedy sans eroticism, Sayra is, of course, drawn to this mysterious gangster, contrary to the advice of her father and all common sense. The woman claims that a fortune-teller told her she would reach the United States in the hands of the Devil, and, in her eyes, Willy is obviously that fiend. (Personally, I found this to be an irksome bit of off-screen ex post facto characterization.)

This sort of thing is emblematic of the broader problems that plague Sin Nombre’s screenplay. Fukunaga runs afoul of a narrative gracelessness with sufficient regularity that it borders on the off-putting. The film has a distressing tendency to imitate the sort of lazy, evasive plotting that is endemic to bad thrillers. Hence its reliance on reversals and chance encounters that serve no purpose beyond satisfying a particular scene’s tension quota, or perhaps providing an escape hatch whenever Fukunaga writes himself into a corner. Characters perish suddenly; traitors are revealed; violence erupts and then peters out without consequence. It’s all presented in a fairly rote and inert manner, signifying with dismal resolve that Sin Nombre is not a commentary on the cruel and fickle character of the universe, just an unremarkable adventure tale. Thank goodness, then, that the film invigorates in spite of its sloppy and often silly story.

The film’s heart is its ferocious and haunting realization of ancient motifs within a twenty-first century Latin American milieu. Fukunaga adapts forms that will be familiar to any student of Greek tragedy or Renaissance poetry. Sin Nombre evokes both the plutonic visions of an Orphic journey as well as the grotesque geography of Dante and Milton, all without declaring itself the successor of any particular mythical or literary tradition. Though it might echo familiar narrative frameworks, its iconography and spaces are thoroughly its own.

In other words, what Sin Nombre does exceptionally well is conjure an utterly immersive and haunting stage for its essentially feeble story, enlivening that story through sheer style. Fukunaga lures us into the twin tales of Sayra and Willy by creating a world that seems to exist in a moral and cosmological twilight. His Mexico, in particular, seems peopled with lost souls, some aching to move on, some content to rule their twisted little domains as resident demons. One is tempted to simply catalog the mesmerizing and chilling locales that Fukunaga presents. There is a railyard purgatory, mired in garbage, where travelers quake in anticipation whenever the trains lumber in like fuming behemoths. Or the cemetery where tattooed gangsters brew their schemes, looking for all the world like skeletal fiends as their cavort among the graves with their guns. Or the muddy-green waters of the Rio Grande, with death-infested reeds on one side and a dubious Wal-Mart Elysium on the other. This is a film redolent with the odors of a waking Hell: diesel, cordite, blood, broken blisters, shit, ash. However, Fukunaga also lights the path northward with daubs of sunlight: a bouquet of flowers, a warm tortilla wolfed down gratefully, a glimpse of a distant saint on a mountainside.

What’s refreshing about Sin Nombre’s marvelous texture is that it resists feverish searches for symbolism, of the obvious or obscure variety. Rather, Fukunaga revels in the literal elements of his setting: water, vegetation, metal, plastic, mud, dust, cloth, ink. Here is a director who plainly adores the material he’s working with—the wretchedness of it, the beauty of it, and the terror of it—and doesn’t need a reason to graft on ponderous layers of connotation. The film rarely gets bogged down in winking allusions, even when it could go for the cheapest of metaphors. A Messiah-like sacrifice late in the film is presented with severity and anguish that derive entirely from its immediate, tragic impact. What it “means” or symbolizes isn’t all that fundamental to the potency of Fukunaga’s presentation. This is a film that burns its resonant imagery into your mind, like a harrowing dream of escape and deliverance that refuses to fade in the light of day.

Sunshine Cleaning
2009 (USA)
Director: Christine Jeffs
Viewed: April 11, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

C+ - Christine Jeffs’ Sunshine Cleaning lounges comfortably within the plush confines of the indie dramedy framework, but it mostly resists the roteness and simple-minded platitudes that usually bedevil the genre. It’s apparent from the first scene that we are not traipsing through feel-good territory: an anonymous man walks into an Albuquerque sporting goods store and proceeds to blow his head off with a shotgun. However, another early scene more gracefully signals Sunshine’s modestly sophisticated approach to the well-traveled premise, Spunky Protagonist Discovers Her True Purpose. House-cleaner and single mom Rose (Amy Adams) stands in her bathroom, still dripping from a shower, and reads aloud from a note taped to the mirror: “You are powerful. You can do anything.” It’s an intriguing gesture that reveals a woman both more vulnerable and self-aware than one might expect of a film like Sunshine. (There is even a gentle echo when a character later discovers a poignant reminder note posted on a door.) And so it goes: Jeffs begins with a story that seems dully familiar, but adds sufficient half-twists to fashion something far more satisfying than might have otherwise emerged. Often these are omissions that intrigue by their absence and add dollops of authenticity to the film’s quirky form. Jeffs shaves off bits and pieces here, skips over the unnecessary there, and generally keeps the viewer on their toes while also ensuring they leave their seat pleased as punch.

Sunshine’s starting point is a factory-model grab-bag of characters with oddball attributes and a plethora of personal demons. Rose is our heroine, a skinny working mom with fear and weariness behind her pixie eyes, not to mention a married high school sweetheart (Steve Zahn) she can’t quit. Her young son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), is clever, troubled, and constantly getting into things he shouldn’t. Rose’s sister, Norah (Emily Blunt), is a habitual fuckup with a waspish tongue and a heaping helping of confusion about her identity. Norah lives with their father, Joe (Alan Arkin), a widower who is perpetually embroiled in ill-advised get-rich-quick schemes.

If you guessed that Sunshine Cleaning is, at bottom, about how these characters learn a little about themselves, survive a calamity or two, and make some positive changes in their lives… well, you’d be pretty much on the nose. What makes the film a bit more intriguing than most indie fare that operates in this mode is the way that Jeffs and screenwriter Megan Holley (in an impressive debut) keep things just a little off-kilter. The beats don’t arrive at exactly the expected places, which gives the proceedings an odd tinting of genuineness, a valuable thing when so much about the film otherwise feels so calculated and gratingly Sundance-friendly.

Example: Rose eventually tumbles to the fact that her flame, Mac, who happens to be a plainclothes Albuquerque cop, will never leave his wife and children. She breaks their affair off, in a sad, awkward little scene that plays out in her front doorway. In another film, this scene might have appeared at the conclusion, but Holley places it between the second and third acts. There’s a pleasing intelligence at work in that decision, as dragging Mac along into the film’s climactic events would be needlessly complex and a diversion from Rose’s more fundamental problems. Yet Sunshine also gives us a taste of the lingering pain when Rose runs into him at a crime scene later on. There’s no explosive confrontation, just rueful and wounded glances. This sort of storytelling grace is refreshing, as is Sunshine’s resolve to let some aspects of its narrative dangle a little. Not everything happens on screen, not every question is answered, and not every subplot is followed through to a tidy little conclusion. It’s a testament to Jeffs’ skill that the result doesn’t seem tattered, but instead limber and confident.

Ah, but now I realize I haven’t even talked about the plot. Primarily it revolves around Rose’s decision, prompted by a suggestion from Mac, to start a crime scene cleanup business. Perhaps unwisely, Rose takes her undependable sister in as a partner, but she also curries favor with the quiet, obliging owner of a janitorial supply store (Clifton Collins, Jr.). As might be expected, Rose and Norah’s struggles with the unfamiliar realms of biohazard disposal are played for pathos and mildly black humor. And wouldn’t you know it that both sisters are haunted by their mother’s suicide, and much of the familial tension stems from this trauma? The story isn’t awful or anything, or even that uninspired, but it does seem suspiciously cute as a button, while the morbid aspects of the film often verge on tastelessly manipulative.

Still, Sunshine’s performances are sufficiently strong—not great, but pleasantly seamless—to lend the film emotional credibility. And, again, Jeffs knows how to shake things up, almost as if she is straining against the very conventions she has enthusiastically embraced. There are a lot of story elements that remain veiled, when they could have been deployed as pellets of crass melodrama. We hear nary a peep about Oscar’s biological father, or about why, exactly, Rose and Norah’s mother killed herself. Oscar asks Collins’ shopkeep about his amputated arm, but he never asks how the man lost his limb. Curiously, none of this is unsatisfying, but rather sort of stimulating. One gets the sense that Jeffs isn’t talking down to us, even if she is telling a story that we know pretty well. Ultimately, there’s nothing extraordinary about Sunshine Cleaning, unexpectedly sharp through it may be. It fulfills its promise, evincing an unwarranted reverence for a stale form even as it grooves engagingly within the confines of that form.