Down and Out

Sherrybaby shows, if a bit too authentically, the unfortunate life of a well-intentioned ex-con.
by Wayne Melton
Rating: 3 out of 5

If nothing else, Maggie Gyllenhaal should land a few action movie offers after her tough performance in the indie film Sherrybaby. As Sherry Swanson, a former exotic dancer and heroin addict recently paroled from a stint in the slammer, it isn’t long before she has to stand down a mouthy roommate at the halfway house, tussle with some corrections officers and yank a bitch by the hair for cussing in front of her young daughter.

These are violent but momentary outbursts of rage and frustration. Otherwise Gyllenhaal wisely underplays Sherry’s troubles. She first appears onscreen after having just been released from prison, and yet she strides through a seedy part of town on the way to her halfway house with the relaxed, pleasant air of a nature hike. Given the circumstances, such body language is unexpected, but it fits: Sherry isn’t a clichéd, melancholy ex-con, but a former teen stripper who really believes this is her big chance to start over. It’s a sentiment that will make the reality all the more grating.

Sherry’s single-minded goal is to reconnect with her daughter Alexis (Ryan Simpkins). An initial visit goes well, but her brother Bobby (Brad William Henke) and his wife Lynnette (Bridget Barkan) are wary of Sherry’s past. They’ve been taking care of the kid her whole life, and everyone but Sherry seems to understand that she can’t just come back and pick up like nothing happened. Unfortunately, they handle the situation less than tactfully. Lynnette tells Alexis to stop calling Sherry mommy, and Bobby stays out of it, tacitly siding with his wife. Their resistance eventually drives Sherry to the corner drug dealer, and it isn’t long before she’s busted, out of a job and on her way to treatment for druggie jailbirds.

Writer and director Laurie Collyer handles Sherry’s brief comeback and downfall with a lot of restraint. There are no momentous scenes in the film. The bad things that happen to Sherry are tossed away like well-delivered dialogue. Sherry has to sexually favor a paper pusher to get a job. She hooks up with a much older, economically depressed man for companionship. And we watch her father casually molest her—obviously not the first time—as she sobs in his arms. Collyer presents such tragedies as just so many minutes passing on a clock—major setbacks and humiliations for Sherry but minor occurrences in the big unfeeling world.

Sherrybaby is reminiscent of Patty Jenkins’ Monster. Gyllenhaal isn’t uglied-up as much as slutted-up for the role, but the social strata is similar. Sherry’s just a better looking version of Jenkins’ Aileen Wuornos—younger and with a little more help from her family. It’d be nice if these movies signaled a trend away from personal statements toward investigations of the lower-class.

Sherrybaby takes a mostly aloof, impartial approach, but Collyer finds this hard to sustain. As any of Sherry’s fellow inmates will tell you, their lives don’t tend to resolve the way a movie would like them to. Monster ended satisfyingly enough with capture and arrest, which was in its own way a kind of release. But what to do with a fictional character like Sherry? Is she just going back to prison to repeat the cycle of victimization? What a downer. Sherrybaby doesn’t tell us. Maybe it should.

The film actually loses a bit of force as it gropes near the end for some sort of open-ended hope. Industry focus groups will always show that audiences favor the upbeat ending, but I don’t think it would keep them away from a good movie. That’s the difficult part of making a hard-nosed picture that’s this good most of the time. You can’t flinch at all, especially at the end. LAA

Rated R; opens Sept. 8 in select theaters.