REVIEW - SUNLIGHT JR.

It ain't about what you don't have. It's about what you do have. At least until you lose even that. The thing is, Melissa and Richie rent a room in a dingy motel, she working at a gas station under an abusive assistant manager, he disabled from the waist down and unemployed. They don't even have enough gas in their car to get her to work; Richie has to suck it out of parked cars at night. But it's about what they do have: principally, each other. But even a dingy motel room and a crummy job will do. Maybe that's just easy for me to say. Sunlight Jr. probably wouldn't be up to much unless things took the expected turn for the worse, or turns. It's a sweet portrayal of a good relationship under bad circumstances for the first half, but that won't sustain the film through the second, and so it changes course. Writer and director Laurie Collyer uses up much of her filmmaking arsenal before then, but the gently aggravating escalation of trauma and tragedy that befalls this couple is Grade A dramatic fodder. Collyer piles on the agony, but with the astute understanding that melodramatic catharsis would be at horrible odds with the style of the film, and so allows it to gradually accumulate, as Naomi Watts' expression becomes ever more fraught and Matt Dillon's speech ever more slurred. Graciously, Collyer is subtler with her approach here than she was with her first feature, SherryBaby, and has lost none of her outstanding precision in isolating, defining and fusing the most pointed emotions and related decisions which we experience in such troubling situations. A classically indie film, its ambitions are slight but its accomplishments are significant, and it is superbly acted. Dillon resists any number of opportunities to overblow his performance, and is affably understated. Watts is given a whole lot more to deal with, but she takes it in her stride, and delivers some unsettlingly, wonderfully frank moments (you were expecting that, weren't you?!).