Sherrybaby
No actor had as good a run in 2006 as Maggie Gyllenhaal, with this movie, “World Trade Center,” “Stranger Than Fiction” and “Trust the Man.” She’s a dynamo, and it’s absurd that she wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award, although I can understand it. Not enough people saw “Sherrybaby,” which only played in theaters in a handful of cities, and Academy voters appeared rightly put off by the sanitized reverence of Oliver Stone’s twin towers movie, even though Gyllenhaal’s performance broke through the soppy veneer.
Anyway, onto “Sherrybaby.” I rented it (it never played in Washington or Baltimore), and I popped it in late at night to get the taste of an excruciatingly bad movie out of my mouth, and I was thrilled by how quickly it accomplished that. It offers a pleasure that should be manifest in every movie: a director who knows how to use the camera to tell a story. Thank you, Laurie Collyer, and I look forward to more from you. “Sherrybaby” follows Jersey girl Sherry Swanson (Gyllenhaal) as she’s released from prison following a stint for drug-related theft. An alcoholic and a heroin addict since her teenage years, Sherry must rebuild her life and reconnect with her five-year-old daughter, who’s being raised by Sherry’s brother and his resentful wife.
The problem that Gyllenhaal effortlessly makes clear is that Sherry really is a baby. She’s about as emotionally mature as her daughter. She can’t let anything go, and she never sees the big picture. She lives entirely in the moment, and she can go from ecstasy to rage in an instant. She wears wildly inappropriate clothing, inviting sex, which functions as a distracting sport or as a means to get what she wants. Couple this crippling arrested development with a disarming self-confidence, and she’s truly frightening at times. At the same time, she connects beautifully with children because she never finished growing up. Gyllenhaal bares her body and her soul, yet her performance never becomes a look-at-me exercise in slumming, like, say, Halle Berry in “Monster’s Ball.” There’s no thick Jersey accent or working-class affectation; Sherry comes from a financially stable middle-class family. She’s smart and articulate enough, but that doesn’t mean she can function. And her upbringing failed her in other ways, as one horrifying scene with her father makes clear. Collyer is shrewd enough to simply document his abuse and never comment on it.
Low-budget character studies like “Sherrybaby” are often described as “good little movies,” praised and deemed irrelevant in the same breath. (They’re even treated that way by distributors, who don’t market them at all and prepare the DVDs with inadequate care; the DVD of “Sherrybaby” offered by Netflix was not letterboxed. You couldn’t even read the opening credits, for God’s sake!) We need a lot more good little movies like this, in which an actor embodies a human being in all her frail, frayed glory.