Well-Meaning Shelter Does Its Subjects a Disservice
Agnes ‘Apple’ Bailey (Vanessa Hudgens) has escaped. She’s 16, frightened, desperate and extremely angry, living with her junkie prostitute of a mother June (Rosario Dawson) proving to be untenable. Worse, she thinks she might be pregnant, making every move she makes even more a complicated burden. Turning to her Wall Street father Tom Fitzpatrick (Brendan Fraser) for help, a man she has never met, their reunion is cut short when his current wife Joanna (Stephanie Szostak) doesn’t take kindly to having a disheveled new arrival suddenly in their home.
Apple finds herself back on the streets. After an unforeseen accident and a stint in the hospital, she is led to a shelter for homeless teenage mothers by kindhearted priest Frank McCarthy (James Earl Jones). It is there she comes face-to-face with Kathy DiFiore (Ann Dowd), a driven woman who has made it her life’s work to help those, like Apple, most in need of sanctuary and guidance. Her goal? To hopefully give those in her charge the impetus, the skills and, most importantly, the support network of friends that allows them to go forward in their lives as women and mothers in ways they potentially would not have been able to otherwise.
Let me be clear, Kathy DiFiore is an incredible person and human being who by all accounts has done something incredible with her life. She is, without a doubt, a marvel, and while one can discuss and debate facets of her personal beliefs what is undeniable is that she has lived a selfless life the likes of which the majority of us can only sit back in awe at the enormity of.
Let me be equally clear. Kathy DiFiore deserves a better movie than Gimme Shelter, this trifling misbegotten melodramatic absurdity a surface-level debacle that does its two main subjects a huge disservice. While writer/director Ron Krauss (Rave) means well, his movie never digs for the truth, doesn’t attempt to get to know its characters in any sort of meaningful way. The film refuses to build relationships or speak in anything other than platitudes, making caring about anything that happens to Apple virtually impossible.
On the plus side, Hudgens continues to grow at a remarkable rate as an actress. She wasn’t especially incredible or anything in Spring Breakers, but it was a noticeable change of pace for the one time High School Musical Disney darling, and as such it proved she was willing to take chances I didn’t initially think her capable of risking. With The Frozen Ground it became clear Hudgens wasn’t going to sit on her laurels, giving that film’s best performance outshining both her more established costars Nicolas Cage and John Cusack in the process.
Her work here is even better. This is a fearlessly uncompromising piece of work that is complex and nuanced in all the ways that matter, hinting at depths and complexities Krauss’ script barely acknowledges let alone takes the time to try and explore. She’s in virtually every scene of the movie, anchoring it with passion and emotion that cuts through the syrupy saccharine clichés rippling through the material making Apple a flesh and blood creation worthy of the viewer’s sympathies even if the movie itself rarely is.
None of which makes Gimme Shelter worth anyone’s time, sadly, Krauss didactically hammering home moralistic points of view with all the subtlety of a jackhammer pounding into the pavement. He easily could have made his points without all the heavy-handed theatrics and in the process made Apple’s decisions have more of an emotional impact on the audience and celebrated DiFiore’s achievements with more honestly ascertained authenticity. If the movie didn’t mess so much up, if it didn’t speak in platitudes and clichés, if it didn’t do a lot of bone-headed things than we’d potentially have something worth talking about instead of unhappily mulling over what might have been.
Be that as it may, wishing and wanting doesn’t change the fact Gimme Shelter drops the ball. Hudgens might be terrific, and Jones, Fraser and especially Dowd certainly have their moments, but the movie itself is still a raging train wreck of muddled messages and missed opportunities that fail to do any of its subjects justice. It’s a waste of talent and time, proving in the end to be nothing more than another January disappointment that’s more annoyingly frustrating than it is anything else.
Film Rating: 2 (out of 4)
