Terrific performances from Devon Bostick and Natalia Dyer can’t save this cliched drama about a college drop-out who falls for a troubled young woman
“She might be crazy, or she might be the sanest person I’ve ever met.” Some cringingly obvious lines really lower the tone of this deep south melodrama (released in the US last year with the title Tuscaloosa). It’s an adaptation of Glasgow Phillips’s novel about a white kid in early-70s Alabama: a psychiatrist’s son, he falls in love with one of his dad’s patients. The director is Philip Harder, a veteran
music promo maker who evokes time and place with the intoxicatingly intense colour and heightened reality of a William Eggleston photograph. But his film, though well-meaning, is disappointingly tame and soap opera-ish.
What it has got going for it is a trio of gusty, heart-on-sleeve performances. Devon Bostick is terrific as Billy, a charismatic dope-smoking drop-out who’s back home in
Alabama mooching about, working as a gardener at his dad’s psychiatric hospital. One day, he spots beautiful new inpatient
Virginia (Natalia Dyer), who tells him she’s not crazy and that her dad locked her up for being a nymphomaniac. Dyer’s intelligent and sensitive performance does wonders for a character who, on the page, looks like a male fantasy: a cool-girl psychiatric case, fun-loving, free-spirited and up for anything.