Sweet Thing
Alexandre Rockwell casts his own daughter, Lana, at the centre of his affecting coming-of-age drama.
Lana Rockwell and Jabari Watkins
Save for the 1992 feature In the Soup, the work of the American independent filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell is little known in Britain but anyone who appreciates great acting should seek out this latest piece of his. It’s certainly an oddity in more ways than one, being a film marked by idiosyncrasies that are sometimes harmful but sometimes entirely beneficial (it is, for example, shot on 16mm. film and mainly in black and white, an offbeat approach today but one that seems well suited to the material). As for the subject, Sweet Thing is a moving study in the resilience of children and it is played to perfection.
Prior to this piece Rockwell made a film entitled Little Feet and in it he gave roles to his two young children, Lana and Nico. That was in 2016 and now both of them reappear here, as does Karyn Parsons who is the filmmaker’s wife and the children’s mother. She takes the role of Eve who is the children’s fictional mother in the story. For a director to promote his own family in this way could easily be a route to disaster, but that is emphatically not the case here. Parsons gives able support as a mother who is self-centred and has made a fresh life for herself by abandoning a drunken husband, Adam (Will Patton), while leaving her two children with him. Nico Rockwell is wholly convincing as the 11-year-old son and Lana in the key role of his sibling, a girl named Billie in honour of Billie Holiday, is nothing short of outstanding. Hers is one of the finest performances by an actress that we have seen this year.
Set in New Bradford, Massachusetts, Sweet Thing (a film which features the Van Morrison song of that title over its end credits) is a study of youngsters struggling to cope in difficult circumstances. Like the young heroine of the recent British film Rocks, Billie is a 15-year-old who finds herself having to take responsibility for her younger brother. We see this first when she tries to handle the dire effects of their father’s heavy drinking (a fine portrayal here by Patton aided by a screenplay which captures the mood swings of such a man brilliantly). Once Adam is taken off for treatment, the youngsters move in with Eve, but she is now in a relationship with a man named Beaux (M.L. Josepher) and is exceedingly reluctant to acknowledge that he is even more dangerous than Adam. When it becomes clear to the kids what a threat he represents, they flee with another teenager whose plight is hardly less serious than theirs, this being Malik played by the well-cast Jabari Watkins. The three of them talk of heading for Florida.
Given the film’s patent humanity and lack of sentimentality (the bond between the siblings is especially well captured), Sweet Thing had the potential to be a masterpiece. But, if its echoes of past filmmaking styles can work well (it often evokes the work of John Cassavetes), Alexandre Rockwell’s handling of his own material can be bizarre. In what can be thought of as an effort to be timeless, no specific decade is evoked although there is a sense of this being a film that is looking back on youthful experiences. Rockwell himself has described his film as taking place out of time but, if the absence of any signs of modern technology broadens up the possibilities in this respect, the use at the outset of Nelson Eddy singing 'Trees' on the soundtrack inappropriately suggests a time so far back that it doesn’t suit the images. At intervals brief sequences in colour appear but without the purpose of that becoming clear and similarly one can’t imagine Cassavetes suddenly speeding up the footage as happens here on occasion. Weirder still are two seemingly playful moments that jar with the mood of the piece. One of these finds subtitles appearing in a scene in which the three children are talking in English and the other is an early written title claiming that this is a film by Aldolpho Rollo. The latter is an in-joke for those who remember that a filmmaker of that name featured in In the Soup, but it’s just a distracting puzzlement for anyone else. All of these touches militate against the film despite its creator obviously having full control of the production. It’s very strange, but so much about Sweet Thing is so good that one is still compelled to recommend it and not least because Lana Rockwell deserves every award going.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Lana Rockwell, Nico Rockwell, Will Patton, Jabari Watkins, M.L. Josepher, Karyn Parsons, Steven Randazzo, Jean Costa, Kenny Silva, Naejaliesh Pierre.
Dir Alexandre Rockwell, Pro Louis Anania, Haley Anderson and Kenan Baysal, Ex Pro Jennifer Beals, Will Patton and Sam Rockwell, Screenplay Alexandre Rockwell, Ph Lasse Ulvedal Tolbøll, Pro Des Andy Curtin, Ed Alan Wu, Costumes Haley Anderson.
Black Horse Productions/Twisted Holdings-Eureka.
91 mins. USA. 2020. Rel: 10 September 2021. Cert. 15.