Do they give out awards for the first half of movies? If so, Stockholm, Pennsylvania deserves them all. Leanne (Saoirsie Ronan), a woman in her early 20s, returns to her parents (Cynthia Nixon and David Warshofsky) 16 years after she was kidnapped by a man and raised in isolation in his basement. We see this brilliantly: Nikole Beckwith’s film starts out a slow and subtle meditation on what it’s like to have everything familiar ripped away from you. How the modern world is weird and cruel when you know of no alternative.
Nixon is superb as Marcy, a woman who doesn’t know how to love this strange adult who has arrived in her home with a different name, a different birthday, and no attachment to her at all. Both women are trying to cope after their lives were frozen by one horrible moment, and neither know how to get help doing it. The premise is ripped from the headlines; the treatment is delicate and astute.
Then we take a turn. Stockholm, Pennsylvania veers into movie-of-the-week melodrama and never finds its way safely back to shore. Marcy becomes increasingly possessive of Leanne and she tries to impose love on her daughter first with self-help techniques and then with force. It leads up to a conclusion that is laughably bad and completely unbelievable, smashing the groundwork laid in the first act.
First time writer and director Beckwith is one to watch, however. The performances she elicits are phenomenal, and the crispness of her staging visual as well as psychological. She can make an all-pink little girl’s room resemble a prison and a woman feeling rain for the first time look like a revelation and a fright. So it’s unfortunate she feels the need to ratchet up the drama to such a fever pitch. Or perhaps she felt there needed to be some hook, some new way to tell a story that has become sadly familiar tabloid fodder. The substance was always there, she just got distracted by all the flash. With a bit more maturity and confidence in her vision, Beckwith is sure to come up with something that’s a knockout all the way through.
