Tag Archives: John Carroll Lynch

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Daddy’s Girl

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She Rides Shotgun

by George Wolf

She Rides Shotgun sports a passionate performance from Taron Egerton as a desperate man on the run. It also features John Carroll Lynch – one of the most reliable character actors around – digging into the role of a crooked sheriff carrying a very nasty streak.

But it’s the nine year-old girl you’ll be talking about long after the movie ends.

Ana Sophia Heger delivers one of the most impressive child performances in years as Polly, a young girl who hesitantly gets in the car with her dangerous father Nate (Egerton) when her mother doesn’t show after school.

You can probably guess why Mom is late, and Polly could be next unless Daddy and daughter make a blood-soaked road trip through the Southwest toward a chance at settling old scores.

Director and co-writer Nick Rowland adapts Jordan Harper’s source novel, a story that shares the roots of generational violence that propelled Rowland’s brooding and excellent 2019 feature, Calm With Horses. And while that film was deeply and unmistakably Irish, this time Rowland crafts some sharp edges from the tragically familiar American meth epidemic.

Egerton is intense, taut and terrific as a father with one last shot at redemption, while Lynch, as the sadistic “God of Slabtown,” mines tension and terror through a measured commitment to brutality. This is just the latest version of a tale that’s been told in countless crime thrillers, but Rowland works levels of camerawork, pace and performance that give familiar themes relevant life.

Heger (Things Seen and Heard, TV’s Life in Pieces) simply amazes, displaying a wonderfully authentic chemistry with Egerton that shines from their very first moments together. And though it’s hard to know in what order the scenes were shot, you start to wonder if Rowland began pushing Heger once he realized just what he had in the little powerhouse.

The violence, tension and dramatic intensity get heavier, and this girl does not shrink from it at all. Far from it. Rowland trusts her enough to deliver his parting shot via a gradual, extended close up that will leave you astonished at Heger’s level of emotion and control.

It’s a gripping reminder that one young actor has a seemingly boundless future, and that She Rides Shotgun conjures an effective remedy for some old wounds.

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Hot Mamas

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Babes

by Hope Madden

Bobby Hill makes a movie. I think we always knew he was a feminist.

Director Pamela Adlon, longtime actor and brilliant voice actor (winning an Emmy for her work on King of the Hill), helms her first feature with Babes, the tale of two of lifelong best friends grappling with the sloppy tensions motherhood can put on a friendship.

Adlon works with a script by co-star Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, who wrote together on Glazer’s breakout sitcom Broad City, so you can guess what to expect: raunchy hilarity based in shameless womanhood.

Yes, please.

This is Glazer’s sweet spot. She’s plays Eden, whose free spirit is met with increasingly harried laughs by Michelle Buteau (Survival of the Thickest). Buteau’s Dawn has just given birth to her second child and realizes that it only gets harder. Everything. All things. Harder.

Just when Dawn could use her delightfully odd bestie’s help, Eden finds herself pregnant, quickly becoming just another bottomless source of need.

Applause to Babes for doing more than checking off boxes: premise, catalyst, etc. Dawn’s pregnancy mishap is actually among the most endearing plot points in a surprisingly lovely, if deeply gross, film.

The raucous irresponsibility that fueled Broad City enlivens Babes as well, but there’s more to this story than body fluids and lady parts. Glazer and Buteau share a charming, lived-in chemistry that enriches their sharp comic timing and riotous delivery.

They’re not alone. Delightful supporting turns from Hasan Minhaj, Stephen James and John Carroll Lynch add depth to situations, developing dimensional characters we become invested in.

Childhood best friendship rarely really survives adulthood. Babes wonders whether it can, with the right mix of forgiveness and need, distance and support, breast milk and feces. Glazer’s irreverent humor loses none of its edge, but there’s now more depth and humanity. The laughs come early and often, but Babes delivers a lot of heart as well.

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Exit Stanton

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Lucky

by Matt Weiner

It’s a fitting tribute to the range of Harry Dean Stanton that his career could’ve ended with just about any role and you could decently argue, “Well, that makes sense.” But to give us Lucky at the end of a decades-long career is nothing short of one last cosmic joke at the non-religious character’s expense: God not only exists, but is a huge Harry Dean Stanton fan.

Lucky is the debut feature from John Carroll Lynch, who is, like Stanton, a gifted character actor probably used to being called “ohhh that guy!” And with Lucky (written by Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja), the collaboration between Lynch and Stanton is pitch-perfect.

As Lucky, Stanton carries more weight than his brittle frame should bear. Lucky is a 90-year-old World War II veteran who has seemingly outlived everything save death. A minor fall and a visit with the town doctor (Ed Begley Jr.) prods the tequila-drinking, cigarette-smoking atheist Lucky to maybe, finally, reflect on his mortality, which he does begrudgingly through a series of interactions with local friends and strangers.

With little more than a light of his cigarette or a hoarse whisper of “bullshit,” Lucky makes it clear that he hasn’t the time or interest in what comfort God or religion has to offer in a world of horrors and loss. Yet the film is deeply—reverently—spiritual.

Lucky is the spiritual heir of Max von Sydow’s knight from The Seventh Seal, if he got to live out his days through the funhouse of America. The oppressive Lutheranism of Ingmar Bergman has been replaced by a more searching acceptance—and both films uncomfortably force us to make our own peace with the time we have.

If Lucky doesn’t waver in his beliefs, he can still realize a sort of spiritual enlightenment. You get the sense, with his age and relative good health, that Lucky is more afraid of being immune to destiny than of dying, and how can anyone find meaning in that?

Thankfully, the film gives Lucky perfectly cast sounding boards to figure it out by way of the supporting characters, especially a show-stealing turn from David Lynch as a man in mourning for his lost tortoise, President Roosevelt. (That this doesn’t crack the top five strangest moments in the history of David Lynch/Harry Dean Stanton collaborations is saying something.)

John Carroll Lynch chooses to leave us with something hovering between resolution and reservation, as if Lucky is one long Zen koan. But knowing how things end doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to discover. Watching Stanton in any performance is to see flashes of some elusive truth buried within his characters. Watching him as Lucky is an untouchable capstone.