Tough-Chick Flicks

An ex-con, a drifter and a pair of kidnappers star in three end-of-summer movies.

By Cindy Fuchs

Manny & Lo

Written and directed by Lisa Krueger

A Sony Pictures Classics Release

Opening Friday, Sept. 6 at the Ritz Five

Lisa Krueger's debut feature begins and ends with 11-year-old Manny's (Scarlett Johansson) voiceover about amazing things that actually happen, with the sound of running water in the background. Yes, it's a movie about life cycles. But it's also quirky enough that it avoids getting bogged down in a predictable reaffirmation of the nuclear family.

Manny is wise and observant beyond her years; her 16-year-old sister Lo (Aleska Palladino) is angry, smart, reckless and pregnant. With their mother dead (and father unmentioned), the girls are on the run from their foster homes. Lo drives an old station wagon, insisting that they "keep moving": they find shelter in fully furnished model houses and steal food from convenience stores. When they start to worry about the upcoming birth (Lo is seven months along), the sisters take up residence in a vacation cottage in the woods, and then decide to kidnap a maternity store clerk, Elaine (Mary Kay Place), who seems at first to be an expert on birth and babies.

Elaine is soon revealed as eccentric, with a set of undisclosed problems in her own past. Like Manny, she's searching for a family, and like both girls, she gradually opens herself to unusual possibilities. The film meditates on a few big questions (What is motherhood? What is commitment? And what do the suburbs have to do with either of them?), sometimes subtly, other times rather woodenly. It also offers careful observations of emotional details. For all Manny's fantasies about perfect families (she covets photographs left behind in the model homes), she's also dedicated to "scientifically" precise measurements: she studies ants with a magnifying glass and keeps records of their adventures. Lo, despite her resistance to the loss of freedom that she sees in motherhood, comes around to a nurturing sensibility.

And Elaine changes as well. Place does well with a hard part (for most of it she's wearing a nurse's uniform and her feet are shackled with a bicycle chain-lock). At first angry with the girls she calls her "captors," she eventually becomes dedicated to their well-being, cooking casseroles and washing their clothes like a good mother should. The movie isn't quite so elegant or funky as the film it can't help but recall (Bill Forsythe's Housekeeping [1987], based on Marilyn Robinson's novel), but it has its own appeal, based in some beautifully precise camerawork and editing and Johansson's accomplished and disarming performance.

The Spitfire Grill

Written and directed by Lee David Zlotoff

A Castle Rock/ Columbia Pictures Release

Opening Friday, Sept. 6 at area theaters

Lee David Zlotoff's film won the audience prize at Sundance this year, which means that its incessant button-pushing style (wondrous shots of trees and tractors) works, for some people anyway. The story concerns a sublimely sweet young woman (Alison Elliot) just out of prison, who moves to a town in Maine called Gilead, where she waits tables at Ellen Burstyn's diner, befriends the unhappy Marcia Gay Harden (married to cruel, domineering Will Patton), and endures gossip and suspicion. There are many lessons to be learned by the small-minded folks in this movie, mostly about redemption, generosity and loyalty. (There's a minor controversy brewing around the fact that it was funded by Gregory Productions, attached to the Sacred Heart League, a Roman Catholic organization in Mississippi: apparently this background makes its manipulations troublesome, though its religious imagery is less cheesy than, if not as effective as, E.T.'s.) The movie's relentlessly sanctimonious posturing and heaped-on clichs are far more annoying than any possible proselytizing.

Foxfire

Directed by Annette Haywood-Carter

A Samuel Goldwyn Release

(But sadly, it's closed already — rent the video.)

Annette Haywood-Carter's first film is charming, almost in spite of itself. A coming-of-age story based on a Joyce Carol Oates novel, it focuses on the transformation of four high school girls (Hedy Burgess, Jenny Lewis, Jenny Shimizu, and Sarah Rosenberg) when a tough chick named Legs (Angelina Jolie) rolls into town. The plot and theme are way simple: oppressed girls join together to fight back (against a harassing teacher, football players and bad fathers) but the movie manages to turn predictable situations around even after they're well underway. Legs wears slim jeans and big black biker boots, and never seems to get wet when it rains (which it does a lot). One girl gets into drug trouble, another into boy trouble: they all need rescuing. Legs always makes too-convenient entrances, but you're always happy to see her, mainly because the movie seems to be self-conscious about the clichs.