by Jason Adams
It's always a thrill to see fantastically talented supporting actors who don't always get the leading roles they deserve actually get the leading roles they deserve. Director Sabrina Doyle's post-prison drama called Lorelei, which just debuted at Tribeca, gives us a two-fer on that front. It stars Pablo Schreiber (of Orange is the New Black and American Gods) and Jena Malone (of Donnie Darko and The Hunger Games and I could just keep going -- she's a long-time personal fave) as, respectively, the ex-convict looking to set his life straight and the girl he left behind. Lorelei starts out kinda obvious but ultimately ends up swerving, thanks to the sheer willpower of its leads and an openness by its filmmaker to follow an idiosyncratic path alongside them. It veers into far more interesting territory than you might first guess.
Schreiber and Malone each have enormous screen presence, if not necessarily in the same ways...
For one way, Schreiber could bench-press about ten Jena Malones if he wanted. (I won't say if "we" wanted, because everyone of us wants to see that, just admit it.) He's built, as the saying goes for some strange reason -- cue me running off to google its etymology -- like a brick shit-house; he's giving off some real Matthias Schoenaerts energy this time. But Malone more than makes up for her comparative smallness, looking as she does beside him like a wee babe, by filling the room through the sheer size of her personality. I don't know how I feel on the subject of "child actors" anymore, but sometimes one come along that you can't imagine having followed any other career path and Malone fits that bill, leaving a generous tip while she's at it.
While Wayland (Schreiber) got sent away to prison for fifteen years, having participated in an armed robbery, his one-time girlfriend Lola (Malone) found herself pregnant three times over by three different men, her life weaseling out of her grasp at every turn. Now weighted down with three young and enthusiastically-natured kids that she clearly loves as much as she's exasperated by, Lola finds herself working as a maid in her depressing hometown, never getting that chance to become the professional swimmer she'd dreamed of being. She's just existing when Wayland reappears, and his quiet wall of charm re-sparks something in her; him too -- these two see in each other the people they once were, and it's immediately enough light against the darkness to make them addicts of one another.
As the child of a single mother who once had a small breakdown and ran away for a week, leaving me in the care of my grandmother, everything happening between Lola and her kids shot straight through my heart. Especially in the film's surprisingly transformative last act, which naturally has all of these tensions, delayed dreams and what-ifs, boiling over. The three kids (Parker Pascoe-Sheppard, Amelia Borgerding, and Chancellor Perry), each named after different shades of blue, all deliver fine and touching work, but this is Schreiber & Malone's film and as such it turns out to be a low-key and lovely gift, for fans and future fans-to-be.