home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Time - Man of the Year
/
Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
/
moy
/
081792
/
08179936.000
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1993-04-08
|
3KB
|
66 lines
REVIEWS, Page 63CINEMAFamily Values Get Real
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
TITLE: GAS FOOD LODGING
WRITER AND DIRECTOR: Allison Anders
THE BOTTOM LINE: A no-budget look at adolescence and
lower-class life -- smart, tough and compassionate.
Adolescents, as everyone in the movie business knows, are
a market, not an audience. You do anything you can to separate
them from their allowances -- pimple-brained comedies,
incoherent action films, imbecilic slasher flicks -- but you do
nothing to connect them with the realities of the often
desperate passage they are attempting to navigate.
Teenagers (and most other people for that matter) are
likely to encounter Gas Food Lodging only by chance, given its
modest release pattern and the fact that it is going forth
unpopulated with major stars, unequipped with big-time
advertising and utterly devoid of glamour. But Allison Anders'
film is like its main characters -- spunky, smart, tougher than
they look -- and one wants to believe that the film, like them,
will somehow make its way in an uncaring world.
Based on a novel by Richard Peck, it's about a single mom
named Nora (Brooke Adams), living in a trailer park in a small
New Mexico town, working as a waitress in a roadside
restaurant, at once harried and patient (and wonderfully
authentic) as she tries to raise two daughters. The younger of
them, Shade (Fairuza Balk), narrates the story of a crucial few
months in their lives. She has a busy, dreamy mind. She may moon
over the romantic fictions shown at a little Hispanic theater
and end up falling for the Latino boy who works as its
projectionist. But she's also up and doing -- looking for (and
eventually finding) her lost dad, arranging a really awful blind
date for her mother. Her sister Trudi (Ione Skye) is more
troubled and rebellious. She has a "fast" reputation, and a
sexual trauma in her past, a doomed love affair and an unwanted
pregnancy in her future.
Both young actresses achieve an unforced naturalism in
their work, and so does Anders, whose first major feature this
is. A single mother (and once a welfare client), she is less
interested in making melodrama -- or ideological points -- out
of these lives than she is in showing how testy affection and
a talent for emotional improvisation can sustain "family values"
in no-budget circumstances. Anders' film is a compassionate
meditation on the desperate lengths to which poverty-ridden
decency must go to preserve itself. As such, it makes
ruminations on this subject by the likes of Dan Quayle look
supremely irrelevant. She's talking reality; they're talking
country-club theory.