Writer-director Shana Feste took that old adage, “write what you know,” and brought her own story of parental pain and joy to the big screen in Boundaries.
She could not have cast better in the lead roles. As “herself,” Laura, nailing it is the always awesome Vera Farmiga. Portraying her father, she scored enormously with the recent Best Supporting Acting nominee for All the Money in the World—Christopher Plummer.
Laura is a free-spirit, single mom, who is flailing in life. She works as an executive assistant to an enormously wealthy woman, who is also a longtime friend. Raising her son Henry (Lewis MacDougall) is a challenge. He is a wickedly talented and intelligent teenage artist, who is having trouble at school because Henry does not quite fit in with the jock and cheerleader-driven landscape of high school.
Laura gets a double-barreled shot of trouble when her father Jack is kicked out of his retirement home and Henry gets expelled from school.
What’s a lonely, single mom with no money to send her child to private school to do?
Contact her long-lost papa, ask for money and hope he comes through for the first time in decades. Turns out, he will, if she and her son will drive him from their Seattle home to Los Angeles where he can stay with his other daughter, JoJo (Kristen Schaal). Thing is, Jack is a pot dealer and the trip that is painted as a chance at reconciliation is that yes, but also so he can unload a boatload of marijuana.
As is the case with most road trip movies, the protagonists will either mend their fences or it will exasperate what divides them and create a canyon of differences from which they cannot return.
The big selling point with Boundaries is the priceless talent at the top. Both Farmiga and Plummer are thespians who I will witness in anything they are in, as they elevate everything. Farmiga was born to be Laura and it is not only her delivery of the rich dialogue she is given by Feste, but how she embodies this woman in her physicality, how she carries herself and even things as minute as how she plays with her hair in varying situations. Farmiga goes deep with this effort—then again, when doesn’t she? She emerges with another triumph.
Plummer tackles a character in Jack that is truly unlike anything he’s attempted prior. I mean, come on—an octogenarian drug dealer?! His Jack is a complex cat, thanks again to Feste’s writing, and through the supreme gifts of Plummer, is brought to life in a manner that is simultaneously conniving, charismatic and a father figure who never aspired to be either a father or a figure to be modeled after.
The most stunning turn in Boundaries is delivered by MacDougall. The young actor goes toe-to-toe in that car and elsewhere with his veteran co-stars and gives us a character that is as nuanced and layered as teenagers are in 2018 with everything demanding their attention. Watch out for this kid. He is something else.
Stellar supporting characters abound. Each play the smallest of roles, but also provides us insight into our big three as they traverse down the west coast. Christopher Lloyd and Peter Fonda delight as longtime pals of Jack and give us a welcomed view into not only their relationship with Plummer’s character, but how that sheds a much-needed light on her father from Laura’s perspective. Then, there’s character actor extraordinaire, Bobby Cannavale, who gets our goat as Laura’s ex-husband who has little or no interest in being a father and living a life that serves no purpose except to exercise his id.
In Boundaries there are some familiar tropes that journey on this road trip flick that we have seen before and moments of predictability that make it a little less resonant than it could be otherwise. But, there is a strong heartbeat here that breathes a swath of fresh air to the familial formula that mirrors a Pacific seaside journey with the windows down and music blaring.
Grade: B