Suncoast
Have you ever watched a movie that was so stressful, scary, or bad that you couldn’t watch it straight through? The constant stopping and starting. So frequently that you put off finishing it until the next day? You feel bad because maybe, just maybe, that takes away the tension, the emotional impact, or the filmmaker’s intention. But there’s just something about it. Well, I’m right there with you because it took me hours to watch Suncoast.
Suncoast, directed and written by Laura Chinn, stars Nico Parker as Doris, a teenager in the early aughts tasked with taking care of her brother, Max (Cree Kawa), who has brain cancer. Her mother, Kristine (Laura Linney), tired and forlorn, works several jobs to pay for Doris’ private school education and Max’s care. At the start of the film, Doris and Kristine are moving Max into Suncoast, an end-of-life care facility that, in a slightly heavy-handed way to connect the film’s themes, also houses Terry Schiavo. It is here that she runs into Paul (Woody Harrelson), an activist dealing with the grief of losing his wife, protesting to keep Schiavo alive.
I have a few problems with this film that have little to do with the craft on display. Chinn does an incredible job of making this film feel true to life. The world she has created feels lived in and the smaller moments (in one scene, teens drive around listening to “Dip It Low” by Christina Milian) brought me back to my own experiences. But that realism can be to the film’s detriment. Watching Kristine yell at and berate her black daughter is just hard to watch. She belittles, manipulates, and in one scene I had to pause, forgets her completely. It’s almost forgivable. I can’t imagine the pain and the anger one must feel when their child has such a debilitating illness. But in a film that often has, it leaves such a sour note that I couldn’t move past it.
On top of all of that, Doris has no friends. She has spent so much time taking care of her brother that she hasn’t had the time to live the “typical” teen life. So when a group of her peers needs a place to party, she offers her place. When watching a coming of age movie, you know that when the unpopular girl invites the popular people to her house for a party, they will turn on her soon. Classic trope. Chinn aims to subvert that trope repeatedly. The first time the popular kids have her back, it is refreshing. But the second, third, fourth time, it is much less effective. It feels as though the film is trying to trick you or as if Chinn herself can’t believe the characters would behave this way.
Between the friends that may not actually be her friends and her terrible parent, Doris finds solace in her friendship with Paul. He is there to both lecture her about being there for her brother and teach her how to drive. He offers her a kind ear and is really the catalyst for her coming out of her shell at school. Per the logline on Hulu, this relationship is the central one, and it is unfortunate that it really isn’t. I have long lamented the fact that Woody Harrelson is on a terrible run at the moment. Champions and Triangle of Sadness notwithstanding, his film output since 2018 has been lackluster, and using him as a selling point for this film brought out the skeptic in me. So imagine my surprise that he is barely in it, and even stranger, a few of his scenes are among the strongest in the film. It is far more compelling watching her crash Paul’s car into plastic barrels than it is watching her buy fake IDs from Scott MacArthur.
Ultimately, the film, much like Doris herself, struggles to balance the many stories vying for Doris’ attention. Any of these threads would have been a great to follow on their own but as they are, everything seems underwritten. Maybe we could have gotten more insight into Kristine raising black children on her own, maybe we could have actually delved into her new friendships at school, or maybe Paul could have been a consistent presence with insight as someone who knows exactly what she is going through. But Nico Parker really shines and this is a solid first outing for Chinn. I just hope that I can watch the next one all the way through in one sitting.
I give it 2.5 out of 5 trash cans.
