So dark the dream
Kavish Chetty basks in the eternal sunshine of predictability
Sunlight Jr. ★★ ★★★
THIS is the kind of film that leaves the taste of dead cigarettes in your mouth. This is America, the promised land, glimpsed from the vantage of its motel rooms and late-night gas stations, neon-lit spaces trembling in existential nothingness. This is a vision of Florida in which drooping palm trees languish under a sky the colour of morning-after dishwater.
Melissa and Justin are lovers surviving the ravages of everyday melancholy. She (Naomi Watts) is haunted by her snake-eyed exboyfriend and harassed by the lurid come-ons of her balding manager at the Sunlight Jr. convenience store.
He (Matt Dillon) fixes old VCRs for “a couple of bucks”, or drinks hard liquor while slumped back in his wheelchair. This is a Springsteen universe of working-class misery, but bereft of the Boss’s poetic evocations which transform the quotidian into an epic of ordinary heroes.
In Jungleland, he sings of a “real death waltz” between flesh and fantasy. You get the sense that Sunlight grasps for those glimmers of hope. But never quite managing to dredge itself out of its self-consciously composed abyss of despair, the film becomes a parade of sad scenes, tearyeyed and beyond redemption.
It’s a rogue pregnancy that pro- vides a sudden burst of happiness for our 30-something lovers, and grants a centre of meaning around which to plot their shattered lives. They lie around in tender embrace thinking up possible names — “Zora?” suggests Melissa, to which her boyfriend replies with his rough glass voice, “Are you fucking kidding me? Sounds like a witch. Or a stripper.”
There’s a certain warmth to their conversations, a kind of volatile romance. But ultimately, it’s undone by the clichés of the script (prepare to see Watts perform a lap-dance to Crazy Town’s Butterfly, playing through a storm of static on a transistor radio). Not to mention the lengths to which the filmmakers have gone to meticulously turn Hollywood actors into workingclass ciphers.
Watts, for example, has perfectly chapped lips and mystifying wrinkles. She speaks with a well-rehearsed southern drawl (“y’all have a nice day, now”). And Dillon, fiery with patriarchal fury and masculine instincts, throws himself at his girlfriend’s ex-lover, and half throttles him to death.
Of course, the pregnancy turns from joy to crisis in zero to 10 seconds as the couple faces unemployment, evictions, alcoholism, money troubles — pretty much a cascade of predictable misfortunes that imply one thing: you wake up from the intoxications of the American dream into the next day of the American hangover.
Sunlight Jr. is a frayed story that’s been told hundreds of times before, thrilling only to someone who squints against all the obvious signs that America is as much a consumer paradise as an asphalt jungle that brutalises the poor. By using all the most desperate icons of the American underside — greasy burgers, beer bottles in brown paper bags, wastelands of stripmall — this film becomes an inelegant confirmation of things we already know. LS Kavish.chetty@gmail.com @kavishchetty