Amer­i­can Woman

This is an intrigu­ing and strange film, one which uses a sim­ple nar­ra­tive bait-and-switch tech­nique to con­sis­tent­ly con­found expec­ta­tion. It lures and lures and lures, and then jolts off in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. From the out­set, it appears entire­ly run-of-the-mill: Sien­na Miller is Debra Calla­han, a bois­ter­ous par­ty girl and grand­moth­er at 32, liv­ing in a seen-bet­ter-days tract house and scrab­bling to make ends meet in always over­cast rur­al Pennsylvania.

Her life is a jug­gling act, as she drops her grand­son off with sis­ter Kather­ine (Christi­na Hen­dricks) so she can dash off to job num­ber one while her daugh­ter, Brid­get (Sky Fer­reira), does the same. It intro­duces itself as a film about the real­i­ties of pover­ty row Amer­i­ca, but is also about how a lack of wealth and oppor­tu­ni­ty doesn’t always lead to abject depres­sion, despite the fact that these con­di­tions make basic sur­vival that much tougher.

Debra is perky and hope­ful, even though there is no obvi­ous way out for her. In fact, there’s no sense that she even wants out – basic com­fort would be just fine for her. And at the moment you start to pon­der where all this could be head­ed, the first big twist kicks in: Debra wakes up one morn­ing and Brid­get is nowhere to be found. The police stum­ble onto the scene, and duti­ful locals comb the land­scape, but there’s noth­ing to be done. Fin­gers are twid­dled rue­ful­ly, and Debra rages as the cops look solemn and help­less, chalk­ing this up as anoth­er unsolved miss­ing per­son case to toss on the pile.

Direc­tor Jake Scott opts for a no frills approach to the dra­ma, and wise­ly leans on his game ensem­ble for var­i­ous moments of high domes­tic ten­sion. The writ­ing and social com­men­tary are sol­id, yet this is Miller’s show­case through-and-through, and might even be con­sid­ered a cap­stone for a run of excel­lent sup­port­ing roles in which she plays the unflap­pable wife to a rogue’s gallery of deranged mani­acs – from grap­pling with her PTSD’d hub­by in Clint Eastwood’s Amer­i­can Sniper, through to step­ping in as stead­fast love of Char­lie Hunnam’s tal­ly ho dream­er in James Gray’s The Lost City of Z.

Her robust, thought­ful, under­played char­ac­ter work is what makes time spent in her com­pa­ny more than worth­while. Her dynam­ic range is exten­sive, and just as the plot seems to jack­knife at a moment’s notice, so too does Miller go from nought to 60 in a mat­ter of mil­lisec­onds. As the sto­ry rolls on and the updates on Bridget’s poten­tial where­abouts dry up, the film shifts once more, and sud­den­ly Debra finds some sem­blance of peace.

The film isn’t say­ing that the work­ing class­es are some­how cal­lous or indif­fer­ent when it comes to this type of awful sit­u­a­tion, but it does make the point that there comes a time to stitch the tat­ters of your life back togeth­er, and it hap­pens here when Debra’s tear ducts have just about run dry.

Per­haps in the end it’s a lit­tle too insis­tent on deliv­er­ing con­ven­tion­al clo­sure, and the final act is some­thing of a take-it-or-leave-it propo­si­tion. Whether this is an indie break-out or not, it’s more evi­dence that Miller has man­aged to tran­scend her ear­ly ​’00s ​“It girl” sta­tus to become one of the most inter­est­ing and emo­tion­al­ly invest­ed char­ac­ter actors on the circuit.