Rediscovering a wasted life
BAREFOOT Rating: ★★★ ✩ some of the old man’s faith in him, he tells his dad – who sarcastically enquires whether he’s still dating strippers – that he’s romantically involved with a nurse. Naturally, his parents insist that he bring her to the wedding. None of Jay’s stripper friends is happy to play along, however. Then he meets a naive young patient, Daisy (Evan Rachel Wood) at the psychiatric facility where he’s a janitor. She’d been raised by an abusive, dysfunctional mother, and had never interacted with the outside world in her 30-odd years.
Daisy doesn’t know much, but she does know that she doesn’t want to stay at the facility, zombified with drugs – so she flees. Jay had previously shown her a moment of kindness, so she attaches herself to him. Although he initially balks at the responsibility of caring for this woman-child, Jay realises that he could present her at his brother’s wedding, as his nurse girlfriend. So begins an adventure (with road trip dimensions) that includes some beautiful scenery in its sweep. (Taking the role of Jay’s parental home is the grand and historic Longue Vue House in New Orleans.)
I would’ve liked the film to have said a bit more about psychiatric facilities that misdiagnose people and keep them in a somnambulistic, drugged state for the rest of their days, although I realise that perhaps this wasn’t the forum for such activism, much as it needs to happen.
Evan Rachel Wood is thoroughly convincing and charming, as the sheltered young woman who gradually adapts to societal norms.
A remake of a 2005 German movie, Barfuss, this is an uplifting contemporary fairy tale that may help you to believe in forgiveness, second chances, and our ever-present ability to alter the direction of our lives.