“Sweet Thing” Movie Review by Josh Davis
June 22, 2021 12:10 pm |
“Sweet Thing” is a small movie with big ideas, and a captivating timelessness that feels almost like Peter Pan running through a junkyard with Charlie Chaplin and Charles Bukowski.
Shot mostly on 16mm black and white film stock, it’s an American film about a dysfunctional family, ironically created by and staring several close family members.
Filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell (“In the Soup,” “Little Feet”) wrote and directed the film and cast his own children, Lana and Nico, as the two leads. His wife, Karyn Parsons (“The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”), plays their mother.
Rockwell is an accomplished indie director who comes from a long line of artists, including his grandfather, the Russian filmmaker and illustrator Alexandre Alexeieff. He studied film in Paris, and beat “Reservoir Dogs” to win the Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival when he was just 35 years old.
In “Sweet Thing,” Billie (Lana Rockwell) is a 15-year-old living with her 11-year-old brother, Nico (Nico Rockwell), and their father, Adam (Will Patton, “Armageddon,” “Falling Skies”), in a particularly frigid and grubby part of Massachusetts. They survive on hotdogs and spaghetti, and their Christmas presents are secondhand and wrapped in tin foil.
Adam is an alcoholic and a lout who works as a bus station Santa and can’t hold his shit together. On Christmas Day, he takes the children to meet their mother, Eve (Parsons), at a Chinese food restaurant, but she never bothers to get out of the car. Instead, her huge, hulking boyfriend, Beaux (M.L. Josepher in his first featured role), beats up Adam in the parking lot while the kids watch from a nearby curb.
In another harrowing scene, Billie finds her dad passed out in the basement and helps him upstairs to bed. Adam wakes up and drunkenly decides he wants to cut Billie’s long hair, but when she refuses Nico jumps on dad’s back and begs him to leave Billie alone, while she cowers in the bathroom.
It’s a gross moment of sweat and cursing and tears. “Daddy doesn’t mean it – he’s just sad,” Nico tells his sister.
When Adam is later arrested and sent to rehab, the kids stay with their mother and Beaux at a beach house for the summer. Billie notices that there’s still a lot of drinking, but, “it’s a different kind of drinking,” poured from a blender into red Solo cups.
It’s also still gross, but now with 1950s surf guitars and brief flashes of technicolor. It’s fun for about five minutes, and then it’s back to tense and dysfunctional black and white.
However, the “scary” parts earlier with Adam look like a happy fairy tale compared to what happens with Beaux, and before long the kids are on the lamb with a new, young friend named Malik (Jabari Watkins, in his film debut).
For Billie, there are small moments throughout that pop with color, like the memory of her imaginary fairy godmother – her namesake Billie Holiday – gently brushing her hair, or swimming underwater in the ocean all by herself. Those moments are shot like old home movies, unsteady and with the wrong parts in the frame. But the intention is clear — that’s what memories look and feel like.
Maybe because the tense parts of the movie feel so tense, the joyous parts also feel so incredibly joyous. Running and away and breaking into an empty house in a rich neighborhood, trying on a stranger’s clothes and eating all their food, looks like Disneyland.
The last movie that felt this authentic and masterful, coincidentally, was also shot in black and white: Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma.”
While “Roma” was personal in a different way – about a family but also sometimes sweeping and enormous – “Sweet Thing” is more compact. Still, it’s just as brilliant, with children playing the big parts and acting like only children can — bravely and naturally.
Lana Rockwell is a star in the making and deserves a shelfful of awards for her graceful, confident, nuanced performance as Billie.
Watkins is also mesmerizing as the “lost boy” who leads Billie and Nico away from danger.
And, of course, the chemistry between Lana and Nico Rockwell is outstanding, and Nico certainly holds his own playing in several key scenes against much older and more seasoned actors.
Patton also turns in a fine performance and walks the tightrope of a lout who never turns into a monster. But, it’s the kids who really steal the show.
The other star is Alexandre Rockwell, the man who coaxed incredible performances from his young cast, and wrote and shot the film with such raw, powerful beauty.
“Children are such magic,” one character says late into the film. And Alexandre Rockwell has captured magic in “Sweet Thing.” At just 90 minutes, the film packs so many figurative and literal punches, and so many sad and happy and frightening and cathartic moments.
PCL Rating: Tupperware
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: FRESH
Tags: film review, movie review, pop culture leftovers, Sweet Thing 2020, Sweet Thing 2021, Sweet Thing Film, Sweet Thing Movie
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