Review: Lake City

You can’t go home again, unless your girlfriend pisses off Dave Matthews by stealing his cocaine and heroin and you have to take her son—who’s also your son, except you haven’t told him yet because you know you’re a loser—back to the farm where you were raised and where your brother died and where his memory continues to wear on your mother’s conscience. Quaintly shot and paced, not unlike Shotgun Stories, but insanely over-written, Lake City dumps on audiences a plot that consists of 500-some-odd puzzle pieces that all come together exactly as you expect. This is the type of film where detail doesn’t so much reflect character as it advances the logistics of a bird-brained ending that has Mary Margaret (Sissy Spacek) running through a cornfield with her grandson Clayton (Colin Ford) while thugs riding a gas-guzzling monstrosity nip at their heels. Is Jennifer (Rebecca Romijn) a cop for any other reason than to provide the just-in-time gunfire required to save their day? Worse, why is Hope (Drea de Matteo), Hooters waitress and junkie rolled into one, even named Hope if it’s not to allow Billy (Troy Garity) to mutter endless variations of “I don’t know where Hope is”? Maybe Jonathan Demme’s sterling Rachel Getting Married has raised the bar too high, but writer-directors Hunter Hill and Perry Moore don’t seem genuinely committed to exploring how the death of a child can tear a family apart; to them, it’s just something to smack the audience upside the head with on an intermittent basis (a red cap, a room that no one is allowed into and something about not getting into the back of a pickup truck). Rather than add nuance to their characters, the filmmakers simply drown them in incident, though it’s a testament to the great Spacek’s gifts that she not only escapes unscathed but suggests she might make a good Bond Girl.