Director: Laura Chinn
Writer: Laura Chinn
Stars: Nico Parker, Laura Linney, Woody Harrelson
Synopsis: While caring for her brother along with her audacious mother, a teenager strikes up a friendship with an eccentric activist who is protesting one of the most landmark medical cases of all time.
The film Suncoast made its debut at Sundance last month and had a short turnaround on Hulu a few weeks later. The movie is a semi-autobiographical tale of its writer and director, Lauren Chinn. She has written a story about her experiences helping raise her brother, who was stricken with a terminal illness. The story is emotionally raw while combining the type of coming-of-age narrative that is empathetic and unafraid to strip away the sugarcoating from the mother-daughter relationship.
Nico Parker (Dumbo) plays Doris, the character inspired by a small window of her high school life. Doris is a loner, socially awkward, and, unfortunately, has no friends. That’s not because she’s a bad kid. She has been cut off from the rest of the world because she is helping take care of her brother, Max, who has brain cancer. The tumor has taken over his body, and he can no longer speak or move. (It appears that he may have a condition known as aphasia.)
As a result, in order to pay the medical bills and send Doris to a better school, her forthright mother, Kristine (Laura Linney), works seven days a week. However, Max’s degenerative disease is progressing to the point where he needs all-day care at a facility called Suncoast, a hospice facility in town. Kristine, overcome with guilt, decides to sleep in the same room as Max so he won’t be alone. The move is devastating to Doris. However, she begins to form new friendships, inviting a group of “cool” kids to her home because her mother no longer lives there.
Chinn’s movie embraces the modern trope of friends forming a support system around Doris, which is refreshing. What’s nice about the script is that these kids act like dumb teenagers but are considerate enough not to dismiss Doris’s situation callously. The other support comes from a man Doris meets at Suncoast, Paul (Woody Harrelson). The character acts as a temporary surrogate parent, guiding her through complex thoughts even if Doris doesn’t want to hear them.
Now, the character of Paul may be based on someone or a composite of a couple of characters from Chinn’s life. However, the relationship is inappropriate for various obvious reasons. A teenage girl hanging out with an adult male nearly four times her age without parental consent is borderline negligent. We also consider this a storytelling device to move the plot along and highlight how consumed Kristine is by ignoring her other child’s emotional needs—you have never seen a teenager want to be needed by a parent more.
In a striking scene, when Doris tells her mother she’s her child too, Linney is cold and flippant, snorting at such a remark. Linney can create a character detached from being mindful of the people she has left in her life, which is maddening and also sad. Doris then becomes an evolving character by slowing coming to grips with othechild’Chinn’s time limit. There are several scenes like that in Chinn’s semi-autobiographical tale, including a jaw-dropping one where Kristine harshly pretends Max is about to pass to get her daughter to come home after sneaking out to be with her friends.
The point of Suncoast is that you have a child like Doris who is achingly trying to be seen. By anyone, really. It’s hard to argue with a script inspired by actual events, but Suncoast doesn’t recognize how much Doris is a child in crisis. One of the reasons I have issues with biographical films is that a filmmaker who is the subject has a brutally unfiltered view of others (like Kristine), and the author, in turn, will show a filtered view of themselves. Essentially, deep insights into childhood isolation, loneliness, and depression are largely ignored.
And that’s fine, to a degree. Suncoast’s tale about a mother and daughter’s relationship that a thread has held onto for years can be emotionally raw at times, perhaps using too many film cliches to keep the story moving. However, Linney’s performance, which evolves from an emotional wrecking ball to a cocoon of warm reassurance, has a beautiful candor. Overall, Chinn’s film hits the right notes when the story counts, and her coming-of-age can resonate with her audience.
