Linney anchors solid feature debut
In the early 2000s, filmmaker Laura Chinn was a teenager living with her mother in Clearwater, Florida. Chinn’s older brother Max, terminally ill with brain cancer, spent the last few days of his life in a hospice center with an internationally famous resident: Terri Schiavo. Schiavo’s right-to-die legal case spanned fifteen years, from 1998 until 2005, when the courts finally allowed her husband to remove her feeding tube. In Chinn’s feature film debut, she turns this grim early experience into Suncoast, a fictional, semi-autobiographical tear-jerker of a movie with a few tonal problems, but also much to recommend it.
Chinn, a TV writer/director, managed to snag some big names for her first movie. Laura Linney plays Kristine, mother to the terminally ill Max (Cree Kawa), recently admitted to Clearwater’s Suncoast Hospice. Woody Harrelson is cast against type as Paul, a widower and right-to-lifer who joins the protesters at Suncoast who don’t want Schiavo’s feeding tube removed (Schiavo is mentioned throughout, but is not a character). Relative newcomer Nico Parker plays Doris, Kristine’s daughter and Max’s sister, and Chinn’s fictional stand-in. Doris and Paul become unlikely friends, and their differing perspectives on the right-to-die issue comprise the film’s thematic backdrop.
The film’s more central conflict revolves around 17-year-old Doris’s desire to be a “normal” teenager, despite the highly unusual circumstances of her home life. Doris loves her brother, but also recognizes he hasn’t been himself since they were young children, six years prior. Confined to a wheelchair, Max can’t walk, speak, or see. How much awareness he has is unclear, but Kristine remains fierce in her desire to treat him as if he can still interact with the world. Linney is terrific here, creating a determined mother whose brittleness and irritability are the direct result of her overwhelming grief. That Doris bears the brunt of Kristine’s short fuse is understandable, even as we empathize with both characters at various points.
Parker gets the most screen time, and no doubt we’ll be seeing more of her on the big screen. She exudes a straightforwardness and emotional intelligence that become even more noticeable when contrasted with the other teenage actors in the film, who all act as if they’re in some sort of Mean Girls redo. These supporting roles–and the story elements concerning Doris’s high school mini-dramas–are part of the picture’s tonal problems. Chinn almost seems to be making two different films here: one, a solid coming of age dramedy in the vein of The Edge of Seventeen, and one a profound meditation on death and grief similar to Manchester by the Sea. The two parallel narratives work well separately, but their melding together never coalesces in a way that feels organic.
On the upside, Parker and Linney make the film worth seeing by virtue of their scenes alone, and Harrelson breathes breezy, sardonic life into an underwritten role. The ethical and legal issues the film raises are thought-provoking to be sure, but again, Chinn doesn’t seem to know how to have her characters wrestle with them in a way that’s more than perfunctory.
She fares better in terms of the film’s honest look at hospice care and the grief of surviving family members: have a tissue or two handy while watching the picture. As a first film, then, Chinn’s attempt is promising. Sundance saw fit to reward it with a Grand Jury Prize nomination at its festival last month, and there’s no doubt Chinn is a filmmaker to watch.
—————————-
Suncoast begins streaming on Hulu today.
