Montana Film Fest Review: Thunder Road
In Thunder Road, Jim Cummings stars as Jim Arnaud, a police officer recently unhinged by a series of ordinary calamities: His mother just died, his wife has left him, things are off kilter with his 4th grade daughter and the fate of his future with the department looks tenuous at best. Besides starring, Cummings writes and directs the feature, based on his award winning 2016 short film of the same name. Maybe you caught the short like I did at last year’s Montana Film Festival. It’s not an easy spectacle to forget.
Let’s be real, people don’t pay much attention to short films; they sometimes seem paradoxically long and without much impact on our lives, but Thunder Road is a strange exception. In the short, we are treated to an uninterrupted shot of Officer Cumming’s bizarre, tangential eulogy for his mother, which culminates in a scoreless dance number to the titular “Thunder Road.” If you didn’t see the short film, worry not. The feature begins with the short and carries the story on from there.
Cummings’ original 13-minute long picture is so rich in character texture and detail that I wondered if we really needed another film to follow him out of the church. But the short won a bunch of awards, including the Sundance Grand Jury prize, so Bam! Here we are with a motion picture, and it’s very nice.
The success of Cummings’ feature lies entirely on his performance. Can we stand to watch a man in law enforcement cycle wildly between irrational optimism and tearful meltdown? Officer Jim, it turns out, is a delightfully complex mess of a human, and it’s a pleasure to watch him fumble through the tatters of his ruined life. In one scene, we watch him try to connect with his bored, hard-to-please daughter who’s grown attached to her mom (Jocelyn DeBoer), whether her mom deserves the adulation or not. (It’s not just that Officer Jim tells his ex that he hopes she “gets hit by a fucking train” — it’s the way he says it that makes it so charming and convincing.)
Thunder Road technically falls under a subgenre I like to call “awkward indie realism,” a slight pejorative when applied to beloved recent films (Eighth Grade), but it’s working for me here. There’s a slightly surreal finish to the “realism,” that gives this a little more style than an artless biography. And at 92 minutes, I appreciate Thunder Road’s swift and hyper focus on the ordinary tragedy of a single weird man.
Thunder Road screens at the Roxy for the Montana Film Festival Thu., Oct. 4, at 6 PM and again Sat., Oct. 6, at 3:30 PM. Free. Visit montanafilmfestival.org for schedule and festival ticket information.
