Review: The Yellow Handkerchief
Feelings of loneliness and detachment usually isolate people from the world around them. But these feelings also can bring lonely souls together, bonding them with a shared sense of separation from their families and friends.
This paradoxical notion that separation can unite people is the central theme of The Yellow Handkerchief, a quietly intense film about three disparate strangers who generally trust no one but learn to trust each other while on a road trip through Louisiana. Smartly written, beautifully filmed and powerfully acted, The Yellow Handkerchief opens in Austin at the Arbor on Friday.
The story opens as Brett Hanson (William Hurt), newly paroled after six years in prison, wanders into a rural Louisiana town with a lot of emotional baggage and no idea where life will take him next. He meets awkward, lovelorn teen Gordy (Eddie Redmayne) and sullen teen beauty Martine (Kristen Stewart) after witnessing Gordy's inept and predictably disastrous attempt to impress the girl.
Although Martine has just met Gordy and has no interest in him, she does take him up on his offer to drive her out of town to escape the boredom of small-town life for a few hours. While waiting for a ferry that will take them across a river to the freedom that lies on the other shore, Gordy and Martine again meet Brett, who is headed for a bus station on the other shore also. At Martine's insistence, Brett agrees to ride with them to the bus station, but when a severe thunderstorm stops all public transportation, their short trip turns into an overnight stay at a motel. When the storm's aftermath stops the ferry and buses from running the next day also, the three decide to take a road trip together, heading toward Brett's former home in southern Louisiana.
Brett, Gordy and Martine meet under unlikely circumstances, and at first it seems implausible that such vastly different people would want to travel together. But as their conversations (and in Brett's case, multiple flashbacks) slowly reveal their backstories, it's apparent that they have much in common. More than anything, all three are seriously damaged goods. Well into grizzled middle age, Brett is on the run from a criminal past, a relationship that ended bitterly and crippling feelings of guilt. Gordy is the quintessential teen nerd -- gangly, smart, socially inept and now adrift, having left home after a terrible episode. And at only 15, Martine already is distancing herself from her dysfunctional family and hiding her loneliness behind a wall of teen-queen aloofness. Obviously, all three are running from any kind of attachment while barely hiding their desire for it.
The Yellow Handkerchief is short on plot, relying instead on well-written characters and superb acting to tell its slowly unfolding story. Hurt gives a typically spot-on performance as Brett; his bland handsomeness and affable demeanor make it plausible that two teenagers would give a normally scary stranger like him a ride. As Martine, Stewart exudes a cool, somewhat jaded sexuality and proves she has the acting chops for far meatier roles than Bella Swan. (Hopefully, we'll see more of her in productions like The Yellow Handkerchief and less of her in Twilight sequels.) Maria Bello is hard as nails in a supporting role as Brett's love interest, May, whose toughness and slightly shopworn beauty hint that she's dealing with her own painful past.
The film's most multilayered and amazing performance, however, is Redmayne's Gordy. Redmayne -- a British actor in his late twenties -- convincingly portrays a Louisiana teenager who is emotionally immature and yet sometimes wise beyond his years, the sort of kid who can't get a date but can tell middle-aged Brett a thing or two about relationships.
Filmed on location in New Orleans and Morgan City, Louisiana, The Yellow Handkerchief also has a keen sense of place as character. The road-trip theme affords many drive-by shots of rusting small towns and lush farmland, as well as empty, storm-ravaged buildings, FEMA trailers and other remnants of life after Katrina and the resulting floods. The weatherbeaten characters travel in an equally weatherbeaten land, but both endure.
My only complaint about The Yellow Handkerchief is the ending. To avoid a spoiler, I'll just say that at the end of an intense story about complex people, the tone changes suddenly and everything is wrapped up a far too neatly to be believable. Then again, indie and art films are famous for ambiguous endings, so my gripe about the tidy closure at the end of The Yellow Handkerchief may be mostly because it defies convention. (Real-life situations sometimes are neatly resolved, so I suppose indie film plots can be, too.) But aside from the ending, I found The Yellow Handkerchief to be poignant, true to life and thoroughly enjoyable.