My First Venture into blogging movies: Sherrybaby

This movie has been sitting on "My Q" on Blockbuster for months. Finally it arrived on my doorstep and given my new-found sense of getting things accomplished, I had the gumption to watch it. From trailers, it looked great.

But something was off.

Sherry is a woman coming home from jail after having done some hard time for stealing to get drugs; she's going through a 12-step program, living at a half-way house, and trying to get her relationship with her daughter back. The girl, Alexis, doesn't remember Sherry, having been raised by Sherry's brother and his wife.

Here's where the wheels started coming off. We're only 10 minutes in, by the way. Sherry is consistently portrayed as "a good heart" who's been dealt an awful lot in life. She, admirably, is trying to get past that and be the parent that she knows she can be; I'm just not convinced and that's what's weird about this movie. Sherry is framed as this downtrodden heroine who we should root for, but I don't. (And I feel guilty about it because I should...I should be on the side of a woman who's persevering and overcoming). I don't. I feel pity, which makes me feel even guiltier--and maybe it's because she's still such a woman-child who's trying to grow up through her own daughter who calls her "Sherry."

Maggie Gyllenhaal is awesome in this, but Sherry isn't and that's the problem. I want to root for Maggie for portraying the sloop-shouldered, raggedy-haired, fawn-eyed make-good woman. But there is no character there. People have relationships: Sherry does not. People have dimensions--again, Sherry does not. It's almost as if slinging a poor white woman just out of the clink onto the screen would be enough to make this work. I don't think this does. It's a disservice; it allows us "viewers" to fall back into all the ready, generalized, idealized stereotypes we've gotten used to assuming are true. I hate when movies do this; it's lazy. Well-conceived and executed details were skipped: who is Sherry and what motivates her? Her desire to break free from past parental relationships? To break out of her current social situation? Just wanting to be happy? Attention to any of these might have given us some insight into a woman of dealing with the consequences of of choices made through the experience of a certain socio-economic status. She's trying to "make it right" without any kind of past framework to guide her. "Making right" is a scary world. But Sherry was done the disservice of being written off by the writers as a floozy who gave in to the demons of her past life; even her creator didn't think she could do it. We have the portrayal of a "white trash" woman embodying everything that label implies (all of which is stereotypical and too simple).

And she seems to deserve more than that.