The View From Tall

Or: 18 Candles

An uncomfortable but earnest film The View From Tall, adapted for the screen by playwright Caitlin Parrish, hefts in hand the many faces of loneliness and the stigma of finding solace. Bullied, precocious, and seventeen, Justine (Amanda Drinkall), has just entered the worst year of her life after an affair with a teacher intensifies her struggles both at school and at home. Sent to local therapist Douglas (Michael Patrick Thornton), to help with her “problem” she finds him making his own way through recent griefs and disability. What begins as a fraught doctor and patient relationship, by unexpected twists, becomes a spar of friendship for both to cling to, and then the key to something more.

Parrish, and her co-director Erica Weiss, spritz a fine mist of melancholy over the film. Justine, threading the indifferent-to-hostile school, cocooned by her headphones, seems trapped in a world all of her own, while Douglas and Justine’s younger sister Paula (Carolyn Braver, this season's winner of the nifty name award) are off set by lurking camera angles, during above or smirking below, showing them to be powerless out of control of their own lives. We don’t realize how pervasive the chill is until it is dispersed by the warmth brightness and solidity of the film’s third act as well as flashes back to the fragmentary but brighter glimpses of a happier (if morally questionable) past.

Similarly the authentic but jagged and murky conversation, inherent to adolescent communication, rounds and clears and sweetens as Justine finds a space with Douglas where she can breathe. This slow spring unfurling is mirrored in Drinkall’s performance: Justine’s poker face, frozen both by jaded cynicism and shock at fresh and new indignities continue to pile up, relaxes and thaws to life, confidence kindling. She is also possessed of an excellent deadpan delivery and and a wicked left jab that left me cheering. Thornton ensures that Douglas’s even-keel professionalism occasionally shivers and cracks with need, an unspoken (and so all the more louder and clearer) need to recover his dignity and be a better support and friend to the girl whose well-being he’s charged with.

Bitter and sweet, Parrish and Weiss’s story show an untitilized story of a young woman discovering sex and intimacy, sometimes even both in the same moment. The portrayal of Justine’s decisions never strays into the blue but keep us wavering, not whether her actions are Right or Wrong, but whether her decision is best for her. And, above all else, the film underlines that those decisions are hers, and hers alone: to make mistakes in reaching for solace, to defend and make happy those few she loves in-spite of their own wishes, and make herself, herself.