Tumbleweeds Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)November 25th, 1999
PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
This delightful indie one-up of Anywhere But Here features better acting leads and a slightly meatier, more realistic story. Like the Susan Sarandon/Natalie Portman vehicle, Tumbleweeds features a single mother and her teenage daughter leaving a small rural town to find their fortune in Southern California. They even pick furniture out of rich folks’ trash, too.
In Anywhere, the Augusts’ departure from Bay City, Wisconsin was a well-planned move about which friends and family knew. In Tumbleweeds, the Walkers’ move from West Virginia literally happens in the middle of the night. Mother Mary Jo (Janet McTeer, Wuthering Heights) has a knock-down/drag-out her current boyfriend while screaming for asthmatic daughter Ava (Kimberly J. Brown, The Guiding Light) to pack up her things. No stranger to midnight uprooting, Ava quickly stuffs her belongings into a bag and the duo hit the road in a car with both broken head and taillights.
Although she seems a bit scatterbrained, Mary Jo has a plan. An old high school sweetheart in Missouri (or “Misery,” according to Ava) with an automobile dealership has extended an open invitation to Mary Jo, who envisions a better life of lavish extravagance and new cars. But things don’t work out quite as nicely as she planned, so Mary Jo and Ava take off again, aiming their beat-up vehicle towards the Golden State. Ava wants to head for San Diego, which they do despite Mary Jo’s fears that it will fall into the ocean.
Mary Jo has a pattern of bailing instantly at the first sign of failure, leaving a trail of bad jobs and awful relationships with pathetic men. She is also the type that falls in love with anyone that makes eye contact with her. Her intentions are good but not always well thought through, as Mary Jo often puts her daughter’s life secondary to her own affairs of the heart.
With a mother as crazy Mary Jo, Ava seems even more jaded and discontent than Anywhere’s princess-y Portman, which makes her character than much more effective and sympathetic. She seeks stability and a father figure, wanting to stay in one place long enough to establish roots in school and develop normal relationships with her peers. Ava’s greatest fear is that Mom will want to book town before her big role in the school’s production of Romeo & Juliet.
Written and directed by Gavin O'Connor (Comfortably Numb), Tumbleweeds offers a glut of wacky characters, from Mary Jo’s perverted boss to her quirky co-worker that enjoys coffee enemas. But the film is still a very touching and very realistic portrayal of a relationship between an idealistic mother and her levelheaded daughter. The Tony Award-winning McTeer is British, which makes her brilliant turn as a Southern belle who grew up way too quickly all the more impressive. Her Oscar-worthy performance is as good as any you will see this year. The precocious Brown is nearly as good, creating an extraordinarily convincing pragmatic character.
1:44 - PG-13 for adult language, adult situations and a scene of domestic discord
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