Boundaries
⋆⋆½ out of four stars
Rated: R for drug material, language, some sexual references and nude sketches.
Theater: Edina, Burnsville.
This slow-boil comedy by writer/director Shana Feste exists in a special genre, the mature kind that deals more with socially awkward situations and the differing dysfunctional chemistries of its characters than slapstick or broad gags. If you've seen "Little Miss Sunshine," "Ghost World," "Nebraska" or "The Royal Tenenbaums," that's the complicated family relationship vibe her film is aiming for. It's not consistently funny. Feste isn't shooting for easy laughs, or even prolonged ones. She wants nervous giggles to come with a muttered "there but for the grace of God go I." But even in its melancholy passages it's funny-adjacent, close enough that I didn't feel cheated.
It also has a remarkable ensemble cast. Vera Farmiga, Christopher Plummer, Bobby Cannavale, Christopher Lloyd, Peter Fonda and Kristen Schaal, along with exquisite 15-year-old Scottish actor Lewis MacDougall, do justice to their roles. The focus is a multigenerational road movie with Farmiga, a self-dramatizing single mom, dragging her sulky son (MacDougall) on a long-distance errand. Her incorrigible father (Plummer), a black market cannabis dealer, was just ejected from his Seattle retirement home. With $200,000 worth of pot to dispose of, he asks his estranged daughter to pilot his old Rolls-Royce down the West Coast, carrying his stash to clients on a farewell tour. If she will work as his roadie, he'll finance his grandson's education.
Though he treated her shabbily long ago and they haven't spoken in years, she accepts, partly to relocate him with her less-alienated sister (Schaal) and partly to teach her son, whom she has raised alone, some cautionary family history before his grandfather passes.
Of course, the old con man, an acidic wise guy, drives her mad along the way and gives her son, a neurotic introvert, the willies. There are inquisitive police to mislead and old intimates to contend with along the way. But boundaries of blame are inevitably passed and unlikely blood bonds emerge along the touchingly bumpy ride.
Farmiga's isolated, depressive character spends most of her emotional energy aiding shelter dogs, and Feste's quirky, funny-sad evaluation of family pain makes it clear that we're all strays at one level or another. The family is, on the whole, weird, but I wouldn't be surprised if many viewers can relate to it in a very personal way.