Butler's Cinema Scene

Sienna Miller

“AMERICAN WOMAN” My rating: B+ 

111 minutes | MPAA rating: R

People can change.

That’s the hopeful message at the core of the often brutally grim “American Woman,” a film that casts American-born, Brit-reared beauty Sienna Miller as a working-class American floozie transformed by tragedy.

Written by Brad Ingelsby and directed by Jake Scott (son of director Ridley Scott), “American Woman” (a terribly meaningless title, BTW) offers an unconventional narrative covering 16 years in one woman’s life, leaping months or even years between scenes and often eschewing big dramatic moments for tiny glimpses of  everyday existence.

If you’re looking to compare it to another movie, Bruce Beresford’s “Tender Mercies” comes to mind. As antecedents go, that’s a pretty great one.

At the movie’s outset we meet Debra (Miller), a thirtysomething grocery store clerk living in small-town Pennsylvania with her  daughter Bridget (Sky Ferreira) and Bridget’s baby boy, Jesse.  Teen pregnancy seems to run in the family.

Debra, it quickly becomes apparent, is a good-time girl who in short skirt and go-go boots is a regular at the local honkytonk.  She is having a shameless affair with a married man, and though she seems a smart-mouthed tough cookie, she’s soft enough to entertain the notion that someday he’ll leave his wife.

This sort of behavior doesn’t sit well with her sister Katherine (Christina Hendricks), who lives across the street with her burly, decent-as-the-day-is-long husband Terry (Will Sasso). Nor does Debra’s mother Peggy (Amy Madigan) much approve of her daughter’s lifestyle. The two are always at each other’s throats.

Early in the film Bridget goes out for a night with her girlfriends and never returns. The cops are notified, search parties dispatched, and a tearful Debra — holding baby Jesse — goes on television to beg for her daughter’s return. She blames Jesse’s father, a pot-soaked stoner (Alex Neustaedter) for Bridget’s disappearance, but the guy has an alibi.

Years pass, literally in the blink of an eye.

We see Jesse grow (he’ll be played at different ages by Aidan McGraw and Aidan Fiske).  As the boy’s defacto mother, Debra curbs her wild living ways, buckles down, becomes a more-or-less solid citizen.

Years later Katherine and Terry introduce her to Terry’s co-worker Chris (Aaron Paul); Debra is charmed in spite of herself.  They wed and, for a time, all seems blissful.

The mystery of Debra’s disappearance will eventually be solved, but that isn’t what interests the film’s makers. It’s the down time between big biographical moments that Scott and Inglesby find compelling, the way raising a kid and dealing with grief and living cheek-by-jowl with family can soften a personality, allow us to find our better selves, turn selfishness into selflessness.

Miller, whose career to date has concentrated mostly on supporting roles (she played Bradley Cooper’s Missus in “American Sniper”), takes this rare opportunity to hold down an entire picture and delivers a carefully nuanced performance that allows her initially to to go big and later demands that she soften as life and motherhood work their ways on Debra.

“American Woman” represents a career high for Miller; one only hopes this little movie isn’t overlooked at awards time.

For that matter, everyone in the film is terrific.  Especially impressive is the way Hendricks and Sasso quietly mine the innate decency of their characters.  It’s like a little shrine to humanity.

| Robert W. Butler