Suncoast movie review & film summary (2024) – Roger Ebert

Can there be something extra Sundance-y than a teary coming-of-age film? That is certainly not a knock in direction of the style. Movies that swim in such acquainted waters might be splendidly fulfilling, like Megan Park’s youthful “My Outdated Ass” confirmed with nuance at this yr’s Sundance. As compared, writer-director Laura Chinn’s US Dramatic Competitors entry “Suncoast” joins a extra forgettable crop of sweet sixteen motion pictures, missing believable character improvement and enough depth to make its themes resonate.

In Chinn’s semi-autobiographical yarn, we observe teenage Doris (a loveable Nico Parker, of “The Final of Us”) as she navigates a tough life at residence along with her dying brother Max (Cree Kawa) and headstrong mom Kristine (Laura Linney, with a severely underwritten half), a lady of frequent emotional outbursts. Doris is wise, affable and endearingly reluctant as a teen—a lot in order that she appears fully unaware of her inside-and-out lovely qualities, maybe as a result of she has all the time lived below the shadow of her brother’s sickness. When Max’s scenario turns into a ready recreation, the household strikes him to a hospice the place Kristine begins spending her nights. And that is when Doris meets Woody Harrelson’s activist Paul Warren amid the early-aughts’ landmark right-to-die court docket case of Terri Schiavo, who’s on the identical hospital in a vegetative state the place Kristine has moved Max.

Paul and Doris construct a gradual, unlikely friendship, whose rhythms don’t land with genuine feelings in Chinn’s script, which lacks the depth and dimension that it requires. However Chinn is extra profitable elsewhere in depicting Doris’ technique of popping out of her shell. Benefiting from her mom’s frequent absences at night time, she begins inviting her brand-new crew of buddies over for events and sleepovers. At first, her new buddies—performed by Ella Anderson, Daniella Taylor, Amarr and Ariel Martin—don’t even appear conscious of Doris’ existence, an unlikely situation given how noticeably genial she is. However her social circle grows as soon as her residence turns into her faculty’s occasion hub. Endearingly, Chinn subverts our expectations about this crew that we suspect are utilizing Doris at first and show that teenagers rise as much as the event when responsibility calls. In that, Doris’ new clan of buddies lend her a serving to hand when she wants them probably the most.

However the movie struggles to seek out its emotional core on the entire, ping-ponging amid the hospice, Doris’ new circle, Kristine’s desperation and the connection between Paul and Doris. That final thread particularly feels irritating, with Paul too conveniently drifting out and in of the story like a ghost each time Doris craves his exterior voice of motive. You could possibly nearly watch a complete film of its personal about this friendship, or about all the things else Doris is coping with. However when piled on prime of one another, Chinn solely scratches the floor of the story, which in the end falls wanting its potential.

One additionally usually needs for one thing extra substantial written for Kristine all through “Suncoast.” A loving and caring mom overburdened with an unimaginable scenario, we don’t get sufficient quiet moments from her to offset her comprehensible anger. The movie additionally doesn’t have interaction with the truth that she is a white mom of a Black woman. In one of many early scenes of “Suncoast,” Doris protests when her mom asks her to trip in the back of the truck, mentioning to her pure hair as a motive. Kristine dismisses this objection with, “Your hair? Actually?” It’s a scene that leaves an uncomfortable aftertaste.