The Off Hours (2010)
A lonely diner on some trucker route in the middle of nowhere. And so the employees as well as the passers-by are lonely, too.
This is a sad movie, but beautiful and felt. It's about several characters--truckers with families somewhere, an older employee who sells her body for the sake of a child far away--but it centers around Francine (brilliantly played by Amy Seimitz). Francine is a young night employee, and since the place is often empty she spends time with the occasional customer. We feel a weariness and toughness in the face of some lonely guys, and some lonely locals. Eventually she has to make a big decision based mostly on externals--not that she wants to, but that she must.
All of this is filmed with a slightly romanticized grittiness. It's made gorgeous and intriguing and not unfriendly, so you wish you could be there. The people have no glam, but they're real, and their concerns for each other penetrate the gloom. All of this makes the movie excellent, and I'd recommend it totally.
But you might eventually ask what the point of these intersecting lives is. Do we simply wallow in a kind of lost world where people are only sometimes happy but whose larger lives are mostly doomed to repeating dismay? Maybe. It's satisfying as a downer movie, but it's also about resilience and love. That's one redeeming aspect to life, as a whole, even when it's awful--there are sparks of true compassion, little gestures, larger attempts at warmth and even self-sacrifice.
That's ultimately what you'll get here--some very good people with very troubled situations. It doesn't matter what they do wrong. It's what they manage to do right that makes you feel for them, especially for Francine, who is a hard, soft, bright, sad, brilliant young woman to believe in.
A lonely diner on some trucker route in the middle of nowhere. And so the employees as well as the passers-by are lonely, too.
This is a sad movie, but beautiful and felt. It's about several characters--truckers with families somewhere, an older employee who sells her body for the sake of a child far away--but it centers around Francine (brilliantly played by Amy Seimitz). Francine is a young night employee, and since the place is often empty she spends time with the occasional customer. We feel a weariness and toughness in the face of some lonely guys, and some lonely locals. Eventually she has to make a big decision based mostly on externals--not that she wants to, but that she must.
All of this is filmed with a slightly romanticized grittiness. It's made gorgeous and intriguing and not unfriendly, so you wish you could be there. The people have no glam, but they're real, and their concerns for each other penetrate the gloom. All of this makes the movie excellent, and I'd recommend it totally.
But you might eventually ask what the point of these intersecting lives is. Do we simply wallow in a kind of lost world where people are only sometimes happy but whose larger lives are mostly doomed to repeating dismay? Maybe. It's satisfying as a downer movie, but it's also about resilience and love. That's one redeeming aspect to life, as a whole, even when it's awful--there are sparks of true compassion, little gestures, larger attempts at warmth and even self-sacrifice.
That's ultimately what you'll get here--some very good people with very troubled situations. It doesn't matter what they do wrong. It's what they manage to do right that makes you feel for them, especially for Francine, who is a hard, soft, bright, sad, brilliant young woman to believe in.