Holly Hunter is a force of nature. From Broadcast News to
The Piano to Top of the Lake to The Big Sick, you can’t keep your eyes off her—this
whirlwind of pointed intensity and no-nonsense starkness, an unstoppable
combination of self-assuredness and fragility. As the focus of Strange Weather,
Hunter is her typical fantastic self, using her committed performance to ground
a narrative about a familial tragedy.
The latest from filmmaker Katherine Dieckmann, Strange
Weather stars Hunter as 50something Darcy Baylor, an administrative assistant
at a Georgia university, the kind of woman who smokes a series of cigarettes as
she sneaks outside to water plants in the middle of an 88-day heat wave and who
lovingly bickers with her neighbor and coworker Byrd (Carrie Coon) about which
one of them will make coffee for the other the next morning. She lives with her
dog in a comfortably run-down house; meets up every so often with an ex-lover,
Clayton (Kim Coates), who runs the local bar; and drives a gigantic, years-old
pickup truck. Darcy is a woman set in her ways, prone to quirkiness and
extremely close to the friends she’s had for years in this small rural town.
But little by little, Strange Weather fills in details
about Darcy’s story: why she lives alone; why her face freezes for a moment
when an HR rep at work asks “You don’t have any dependents, correct?”; why the
young man she runs into at a grocery store treats her with a mix of wary
familiarity and polite Southern remove. The film eventually moves toward a
road-trip format as Darcy decides to drive to Florida to confront someone she
believes wronged her family, stopping along the way in places she thought she
left behind years ago. “Who said anything about a mission of violence?” Darcy
asks Byrd innocently, but when you pack a gun on the way to confront a man,
violence is pretty much a guarantee.
So much of the strength of Strange Weather is in Dieckmann’s
script, lines of which Hunter chews up, savors the flavor, and spits back out
with her rapidfire delivery. The dialogue is a mixture of folksy Southern
colloquialism and direct, confrontational questioning, and that dichotomy is
Hunter’s sweet spot—she flows easily between charming someone in one breath and
then aggressively going after their weaknesses in the next. Her facial
expressions are miraculous: What you’ll remember most about Darcy are her
quizzical looks when someone shares something about her family that she didn’t
know, or how her face will go blank for a moment when she’s caught off-guard
before regrouping into defensiveness, or when she tries to blink through tears
instead of being overwhelmed by rage and pain. It’s a performance that
showcases every great thing Hunter can do, and there are a whole damn lot of
them.
She’s supported most by Coon, who has a standout scene
toward the end of the film that practically confirms her as Hunter’s successor
in gut-wrenchingly honest moments of emotional suffering. And Hunter has a nice
chemistry with Coates, who plays a man simultaneously sick of waiting for Darcy’s
love and attention and yet unable to give up on a relationship that has clearly
developed over years: “You do know it’s my job to protect you from you?” he
asks her. After they have sex, Darcy burrows her head into Clayton’s chest,
curled up on his body, listening to his heartbeat—and you understand the
comfort these two slightly broken people bring each other.
There is an exchange between Darcy and Byrd that captures
the ultimate struggle at the heart of Strange Weather: “I do consider myself
something of a free spirit,” Darcy says casually to her travel companion, only
to have Byrd mutter matter-of-factly, “Nothing of your spirit’s free.” What
happens to grief when it remains unresolved? When selfishness as
self-preservation loses its appeal? Despite some of its narrative problems—a
who-dunnit-structure that falls a little flat, a rushed final act—those are the
questions Strange Weather addresses, and they are deeply, almost uncomfortably
personal, intensely engrossing, and wholly supported by Hunter’s magnetic
performance.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Guttenbergs
