Thunder Road (2018)
Thunder Road (2018) Written, directed, and starring Jim Cummings
Jim Arnaud smashes batteries into the pink shell of his daughter’s CD player with the palm of his hand. He looks like one of those women on the shopping channel struggling to cut a tomato with a kitchen knife. This is the feeling of everything falling apart.
You’d be forgiven for expecting comedy from Thunder Road. After bearing witness to the CD player fiasco, it opens with a painful but bravely acted long take: Jim (played by writer/director Cummings) paces his way through a eulogy at his mothers’s funeral before haphazardly dancing across the stage, seemingly motivated by desperation as nothing he’s trying to say is coming out quite right. Tearful and apologetically attempting to gather his wits, you know as well as Jim does that the situation is no longer within his control. The dancing stops only when his daughter rushes to his arms. You can imagine her bewilderment. Is she upset for her father’s loss, or experiencing a more generalised sense of emotional agony due to the absurdity of it all?
The absurdity carries through the rest of the film but it’s more likely to make you cry than inspire a laugh. What humour there is to Thunder Road pales in comparison to the pathos felt for the plight of ordinary human struggle. Jim is undeniably an odd duck, but his unraveling is not so outlandish in origin. Mother recently buried, we meet our main character just as everything is about to get a whole lot worse. So when we see him waver at the precipice of a breakdown (more than once in the span of this brief hour and a half affair) the squeak in his voice is relatable. “I opened the door for someone today and got angry when they didn’t say thanks” he says by way of explanation for his fragile veneer of composure—and we get it. The piling up of minute disappointments is enough to make any one of us incapable of handling the big picture, especially when we’re trying so hard to do the right thing. Later when asked how the funeral went, Jim replies that “it went normal.” In the grand scheme of our trying to make sense of our own suffering, he’s probably right.
Ensuring that the audience can empathise with Jim’s character helps to explain why, despite fumbling all codes of social conduct, he still has friends and family to see him through. If this film was nothing but an opportunity for schadenfreude, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. As it stands, I found myself reflecting on the extreme discomfort of being someone’s child—the boredom of experiencing a parent’s ineptitude combined with an overwhelming love and sadness for the reality of their imperfection. As Jim’s daughter, young Kendal Farr plays this role perfectly. We see her fluctuate between dismay and indifference as her character Crystal struggles to make sense of dad’s floundering. Her delight at his surprising her with having learned a playground game and his effort to master the game overnight is incredibly touching and real. The relief of having overcome Crystal’s disappointment is written all over Jim’s face. It’s one of his few victories, fleeting but heartbreakingly important for a guy who needs something to go right.
In defence of the funeral dance number, Jim routinely assures others that there are many ways of dealing with grief. This is of course true, but I think most of us would prefer that no one bears witness to our most vulnerable and volatile states. Or if they do, that they are there to comfort and not ridicule. Standing at the front of that church, Jim is without allies. His best friend is unable to attend and his sister and brother are no shows. The only person with whom the camera makes eye contact is his ex-wife, sitting coldly incredulous in the corner pew. Originally released as a short film, this standalone scene is nearly unbearable to watch and I can imagine making fun of Jim as a coping mechanism for discomfort. And perhaps that’s his primary plight, being written off as a nice guy who’s nevertheless too kooky to bring home to dinner. So I’m glad that Cummings wrung a feature film out of that one scene, allowing us to see Jim as a father, son, brother, and friend rather than just an oddity. Like growing up and realising that your parents are only human, there’s a depth of humanity exposed in Jim’s chaotic attempts at protecting the things that he loves even while his life falls apart. It’s a film that cares about its characters, and I think you will too.