Oxford Film Festival Review: Kiel Thorlton’s A PLACE CALLED HOME Brings Down-home Drama and Family Redemption
A Place Called Home, frankly, is not the most promising title for a movie. It’s popular – IMDB lists five projects with that title – but it evokes a kind of generic wholesomeness that might not lure a festival viewer in sight unseen. However, calling it something more like Shit Happens is probably out of the question, though just as appropriate. Because, for the most part, this is not the comfort food it seems.
Sponsored Ad
Find great indie films available to watch now on Amazon Prime:
Click here to browse indie film libraries
Find Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems
While one wouldn’t call this a horror movie, it evokes a similar feeling of mounting dread by piling anxieties upon its regular-guy protagonist, Levi (Ben Gavin).
It’s not as frenetic or blood-pressure raising as the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, but like that movie, it keeps adding obstacles in its protagonist’s narrow path to safety, only here, for the most part, he doesn’t deserve them. And even if he did, the movie constantly offers reminders that this could happen to you. Or anyone.
Kiel Thorlton’s drama, which recently screened at the Oxford Film Festival, follows Levi, a single father. His wife died suddenly of childbirth complications, leaving him to raise new infant daughter Allie and seven-year-old Maddie (McCarron Stith). That would be enough of a burden for any man to bear, but it’s made worse by the fact that his wife handled all the bills. Out-of-control bills. And it’s not like the factory job where high-school dropout Levi works does daycare. His in-laws maintain a lavish lake house, but when it comes to helping out, they’d rather finger-point and chide his supposed financial irresponsibility than donate a check. Meanwhile, everyone in the neighborhood feels free to tell him how much better he needs to do as a parent, while pressures and obligations mount in every other area.
Levi may have been irresponsible in the past, but writer-director Thorlton makes clear that it would take a superhuman effort, more than Levi or any of us might have inside, to handle his business in the present. Desperate, he turns to a local loan shark he heard about from an acquaintance of an acquaintance, and it’s not clear how he ever expects that to go well, but no other options seem apparent.
Thorlton and his DP Aaron Von Buseck create the look of faded 70’s family photos, with characters wearing bright colors but the light, and possibly film stock, is slightly bleaching them in a nostalgic haze. It creates a familiar, “good old days” vibe, while the story emphasizes that such days could be decidedly in the rearview if Levi doesn’t figure something out fast. Wood-paneled, one-story houses for the regular folk, two stories with generically fancy fixtures for the better-off. Yet just as Winter’s Bone made its back-country homes seem like a Game of Thrones fiefdom, A Place Called Home makes its simple, oblong houses on spacious, flat land into metaphorical fortresses of darkness.
In some ways, the story offers a similar arc to many Christian movies: man sustains tragedy, man slowly loses things, man learns to ask for help and finds redemption. It’s impressive how effective such a story can be with good actors and a distinct lack of awful modern religious pop music. Like many melodramas and their modern homages – Far From Heaven comes to mind – the movie understands that a big tearful breakdown is the climactic money shot for the genre. Unlike so many, it doesn’t try to force-feed the emotion. By steadily amping up the pressure, small moments of dread build to that crescendo. A baby left beside a playground roundabout – is it in danger? That door handle the camera suddenly pans across to – what’s behind it that will screw things up for Levi again?
And Levi could be any of us. Even those of us without kids understand that we’re one damaging loss away from disaster in the current class stratification. And everyone around is too busy with their own problems to notice. If they do notice, they chalk it up to poor character. But character gets tested by desperation; Thorlton parallels Maddie’s increasingly aggressive behavior with her father, who takes forever to realize he’s modeling that for her.
Thankfully, A Place Called Home sees hope in, well…the title does spell it out. If the home is worth protecting, it’s not just because of the building but also the people around it. Is this undue optimism in an increasingly radicalized world of demonization? Maybe. But in the movies, at least, optimism can still be earned.