When doing the time isn’t enough for doing the crime
American cinema and television thoroughly covers the events leading up to someone’s arrest, trial and conviction or exoneration. But what happens after prison, when the convicted must return to their community, and face an entirely different kind of trial?
Such is the subject of the truly outstanding Home, which made its North American debut at the 2021 San Francisco International Film Festival, and is the writing and directorial debut of Franka Potente. With exceptional performances by Jake McLaughlin, Aisling Franciosi, Kathy Bates, Derek Richardson, and Stephen Root, the film by turns creates ominous tension relieved by hopeful spontaneity, and counsels us that, regardless of our pasts, our mistakes, and our regrets, ultimately all we have is each other.
We’re introduced to Marvin (Jake McLaughlin) with no context except through the puzzling shot of him riding a skateboard in an outdated tracksuit down a lonely California desert highway at dusk. Marvin’s surroundings, and his story, emerge slowly and piecemeal. He’s in a dusty desert town. He gets coffee at a gas station. He’s festooned with tattoos, has broad shoulders that hold so much tension, and a bright red mullet verging on a rattail haircut. His blue eyes are piercing, but sad, and set against a full mouth that can’t seem to smile. The counter person knows him — talks with her friend out in back during a smoke, and says that Marvin’s out, and back in town. The manager also knows him. Calls are made. The word starts to get out in town. Who is this guy?
He skates his way to a grimy box of a house on a sandlot with two menacing dogs patrolling the yard. The cramped rooms inside suffer from clutter, neglect, and a pervasive sense of doom. In a back bedroom he finds a Black man seemingly attacking an older white woman. He pulls the man off and starts pummeling him, until her shrieks eventually tell him the Black man is a caretaker administering to his mom’s stricken body.
So do the narrative and character details emerge, with a certain satisfying frustration, until at least a broad sketch emerges. Marvin has done something horrible – murder – and has just been released from prison and has returned home to care for his mother – Bernadette. But who was murdered? Why? Does the victim have family in town? Do they know Marvin is back? Streams of questions propel the narrative forward.
Marvin slowly reconnects with the town, and as the town learns of his return, the old connections are remade, the old animosities remembered, and the old hatred is rekindled. Marvin tries clumsily but genuinely to care for his mom, played with a simmering intensity by the fearsomely great Kathy Bates. We learn her body is shot through with cancer. She has probably weeks to live. Make the days count says the weary but still kindhearted doctor, played by Paul Cassell.
It’s a small town. Word travels fast. Marvin hangs with his old friend Wade, who was involved with the murder but not tried, but who’s paid a terrible price nonetheless. Marvin also runs into Father Browning, unkempt and haggard, played by Stephen Root, and begs off a return to Sunday services.
Word of Marvin’s return also finds Delta, played by Game of Thrones alum Aisling Franciosi, who was a very young girl when the murder occurred, now a single mom struggling through a graveyard shift janitor job at the hospital, and compromised herself by regularly stealing drugs and selling them to the tweakers under the overpass.
Marvin’s care of Bernadette, and the eventual reckoning touched off by his return, are two narrative threads that periodically intersect and separate, eventually coming together in a climax with as much emotional intensity as anything I’ve seen in years.
The performances in Home are things to savor. This is a film for young directors to watch to learn what good acting is all about. Potentate’s script is solid, not great, but she has created a marvel of restraint in McLaughlin’s Marvin. She understands that what he doesn’t say, and what we don’t learn, is as compelling as some collection of backstory flashbacks that shut down our imagination, and force too much thought into the murder, and not its effects on the community.
Bates deserves an entire article. It’s simply astounding that a two-time Oscar winner, two-time Primetime Emmy winner, Golden Globe winner, director of several Six Feet Under episodes and herself a cancer survivor since 2003 even appears in this film. Her Bernadette contains an awe-inspiring combination of grief, constant physical and emotional pain, regret, sadness, and daily anger to bear against a deep well of motherly instinct and an almost superhuman ability to live in the moment. The performance is a gem to add her already healthy crown.
Also worth noting are a number of performances that deserve much more space. Through Aisling Franciosi’s eyes we can feel a genuine attraction for Marvin, and the extreme conflict that attraction will engender. Derek Richardson’s tweaker Wade carries in his dialog delivery and his gait his haunted life, and his inability to ever figure out how to address it. Stephen Root, a surprising choice to play a priest, waits until the film’s end to shine, then gives us a Father Browning who knows his mission is doomed, his flock in a death spiral, but who delivers the film’s message with equal parts exhaustion and hope.
Home is a marvel, and I’ll bet a paycheck that it will appear on a platform soon, if not in theaters (one can hope!). I’ll also bet a paycheck that if she wants to, Potente will soon be a directorial force to be reckoned with.
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A wide release date for Home has yet to be announced.
