NOW IN THEATERS! The great indie boomerang has brought another great director back to where it all began in the gritty drama Prisoner’s Daughter, directed by Catherine Hardwicke. Max (Brian Cox) is a former prizefighter who is in prison for horrible things he did for the mob while he was using. He finds out he is dying of pancreatic cancer, so the prison is willing to consider letting him serve the rest of his time under hospice house arrest. He just needs to convince his daughter Maxine (Kate Beckinsale) to agree to take him in.
Maxine’s life keeps smashing into asphalt over and over, with lots of thanks owed f****d up Max for her f****d up childhood. She is so desperate she has to cut the pills in half that keep her kid, Ezra (Christopher Convery), from having seizures. She has to raise him by herself as his father, Tyler (Tyson Ritter), is a drug-addict musician who lives in a homeless squat with other narcotic enthusiasts. When Tyler has a dope-fueled outburst at Maxine’s job and gets her fired, she is looking at a fast-approaching brick wall.
That is when Max calls from prison with the big news. The whole thing seems like a s**t sandwich to Maxine, but with nothing else to eat and being offered help financially, she agrees. However, as she tells Ezra that her father died years ago, Max has to pretend to be Maxine’s “uncle.” Ezra is having a tough time, as he is getting beaten up regularly by Dennis (Cooper Nelson) and his gang at school because they don’t like the way he has seizures. So it makes sense when Ezra asks the mysterious Uncle Max if he knows anything about fighting.
“…willing to consider letting him serve the rest of his time under hospice house arrest…”
With Prisoner’s Daughter, director Hardwicke delivers her edgiest movie since Thirteen, her groundbreaking indie debut twenty years ago. Like that film, Prisoner’s Daughter highlights the perpetual struggles of American families headed by single moms. We don’t see this enough in movies, as daily survival for many involves a constant reality of ends never meeting. The excellent screenplay by Mark Bacci illuminates the endless pressure points these families endure with an iron spine. Something that rings this true is usually drawn from real life, and if it wasn’t, I was totally fooled. It also looks very real, thanks to the production design work of Pele Kudren and the set decoration by Limenea Crabtree.
The verisimilitude of the decor of the drowning class is astonishing, with everything peeling in the right direction. The surreal graffiti jungle of the father’s squat will summon reverberations of the now classic look of Hardwicke’s Lords of Dogtown. If you are like me, you were thrilled by Hardwicke’s earlier work in the indie sphere. Let it be known that everything you liked back then is back in Prisoner’s Daughter.
Prepare to see all previous vanishing points of Kate Beckinsale’s abilities as an actress be obliterated. Her master turn as Maxine shows a genuine nervous system of chronic frustration dipped in shining chrome. Each move is both real but also calculated for maximum response from the audience. Beckinsale’s intensity in her acting has the same impact one gets from the work of director Samuel Fuller: real and relentless.
Cox once again shows us the kind of hard sorcery he delivers dependably. He is perfect for Max. Like many of his roles, you are teetering on a rickety bridge of his kindness over an endless black sea of his ruthlessness. Convery kicks a*s as Ezra and comes off like a real kid over and over, whereas others would have disappeared in a cloud of cute. We also have the pleasure of the great Ernie Hudson in a key supporting role as Hank, the gym owner who owes Max. Hudson brings that warm wave of familiarity beloved character actors exude. Hardwicke gets all her players to all dance on the lip of doom to the beat, and it is fantastic. Prisoner’s Daughter is a drama that stings hard but also unleashes a lot of hope. It is a great reason to be excited about the great American indie tradition again.
