Writer-director Karen Moncrieff, a former soap opera star making her feature directorial debut, brings to this story much of the same emotional purity and delicate attention to character that actor Todd Field brought to In the Bedroom.
Blue Car, a disarmingly intimate drama that received a strong response from audiences at 2002’s Sundance Film Festival, takes place in a small Ohio town, where Meg (Agnes Bruckner), a working-class high schooler, is nurturing her gift for poetry under the guidance of her AP English teacher, Mr. Auster (David Strathairn). Meg’s home life her dad is long gone, her mom (Margaret Colin) is angry and mostly absent, her younger sister (Regan Arnold) mutilates her body and refuses to eat is awfully dreary, but Mr. Auster convinces Meg that her talent may be her ticket out. He encourages her to enter a poetry contest with a scholarship prize and counsels her during his lunch hour to develop her gifts. And then well, and then, since one of the most striking aspects of Blue Car is the way in which bad situations grow suddenly, organically worse, there’s no point in cataloguing the pain that Meg soon faces.
She ends up in the midst of a good, old-fashioned downward spiral, almost wholly as a result of the indifference or sinister motives of others and finds that only she can cushion her own fall.
The emotional weight of the film lies almost solely on Bruckner’s shoulders. Although at first she seems slightly too pretty to accurately embody a character who is invisible to most of the people in her life, the actress grows to inhabit her character so fully that it hardly matters. Meg may be a remarkably articulate poet, but she is a quiet person, and Bruckner uses the character’s reticence toward vocal self-expression to create an aura of emotional shellshock. When Meg’s outbursts do come, they cut deep. It’s a heartbreaking performance. Strathairn nimbly navigates molten emotional territory in his portrayal of the mentor who may care a little too much (or is it, finally, too little?).
Moncrieff’s inexperience occasionally rears its head I swear the lighting didn’t match in a key classroom scene between Strathairn and Bruckner, and characters like the cartoonishly shrewish Mrs. Auster (Frances Fisher) are seriously overbaked but overall she has created a powerful and confident debut feature. Few filmmakers have been able to capture the particular challenges facing teenage girls so accurately and movingly.
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