'Sherrybaby' review
Issue #29
By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: September 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
Sherrybaby
Directed by Laurie Collyer
Maggie Gyllenhaal has one of the most intriguing faces of her generation. She also has what is arguably the worst posture of any actor to have crossed the screen since Lillian Gish fretted silently in The Birth Of a Nation. Nowhere is this more evident than in Sherrybaby, Laurie Collyer’s compelling, often frustrating look at a young woman’s attempts to rebuild her life after completing a three-year drug-related prison sentence.
As Sherry, Gyllenhaal puts her slouchy shoulders to fantastic use, using them to convey both beaten-down malaise and casual defiance as she makes her way from prison to a halfway house to the suburban New Jersey home of her brother, who lives there with his wife and Sherry’s young daughter, Alexis. Sherry is desperate to win back Alexis’s trust and affection, which proves to be no easy task. Not only must Sherry accept the fact that she is basically a stranger to her daughter, she must also contend with the skepticism of her sister-in-law — who sees Sherry, with her tight miniskirts and halter-tops, as little more than a bra-less, irresponsible menace — as well as her own demons, which she possesses in spades. Stubborn, selfish, and given to impulsive rage, Sherry also struggles with the ghosts of the heroin addiction she claims to have kicked in prison. As such, she’s prone to the kind of bad decisions and worse behavior that inspire more exasperation than sympathy.
But Collyer, blessedly, isn’t interested in telling yet another fuck-up-with-a-heart-of-gold sob story; instead, she’s asking us to see her protagonist simply as a badly flawed character who, like the rest of us, is trying to make her life into something worth living, let alone enjoying. And thanks to both Collyer’s assured, kinetic direction and Gyllenhaal’s honest, un–self-conscious portrayal, that’s not too much to ask.
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