In this age of TV shows and movies in which high school students are played by 20-somethings with pretty, packaged problems, Karen Moncrieff’s critically acclaimed directorial debut, “”Blue Car,”” is refreshing in its honest portrayal of a teenager whose life has taken a turn for the confusing.
Sixteen-year-old Agnes Bruckner gives an astoundingly natural performance as Meg Denning, a high school senior grappling with her parents’ divorce. Neglected by an overworked mother (Margaret Colin), Meg is left in charge of an emotionally troubled younger sister, played by the haunting Regan Arnold. When Meg’s AP English teacher Mr. Auster (indie veteran David Strathairn) sees potential in her poetry, she turns to him in a somewhat stereotypically inappropriate authority-figure-as-surrogate-father plot move.
But while the basic storyline of “”Blue Car”” may feel familiar, superb acting prevents the predictable student-teacher relationship that develops from feeling tired. Mr. Auster encourages Meg to enter a national poetry contest in Florida, which becomes her ultimate goal, setting off a series of delinquent moves as she tries to get the money to travel to Florida to compete. Once in Florida, the contest serves only as a painful culmination for the relationship between student and teacher.
Straitharn’s performance as the teacher with untold demons is a darkly complex one that forces the viewer into the uncomfortable position of understanding what motivates even his most reprehensible actions.
At the film’s debut at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, it drew comparisons to “”American Beauty”” for its portrait of what lurks beneath the surface of everyday suburban lives. But where the earlier film built on stylized irony in the relationships between characters, “”Blue Car”” draws its major strength from the raw authenticity of the actors’ performances.
Special features on the DVD include a feature commentary with writer-director Moncrieff that is not, as feature commentary goes, entirely insightful. Deleted scenes, such as a sequence in which Meg attempts to sell her body in order to get to Florida, portray a more desperate aspect of Meg’s personality that the film hints at but leaves, for the most part, unexplored.
Even the lulls in the film ‹ such as the writer-director’s indecision toward Meg’s relationship with her mother ‹ manage to come off as the vacillations of an actual adolescence, thanks to a heartbreakingly real performance from Bruckner. Through this young actress’s best moments, “”Blue Car”” becomes one of the most honest coming-of-age stories told in a long time.
