Review: Every Secret Thing

The story of Ronnie and Alice, who as girls were not the best of friends, but overweight Alice’s mother (Diane Lane) pretty much forced Alice to include Ronnie (who comes from a not great home life) in everything. Ronnie’s shy and a little weird, whilst Alice is jealous, spiteful, and needy. When they were both 11, Ronnie and Alice get convicted of killing a biracial baby and sent to juvenile detention. At age 18 they are released from juvey, Alice (Danielle MacDonald) and Ronnie (Dakota Fanning) aren’t finding an easy time of it re-integrating into society, and it’s clear that Alice’s mother still very much favours Ronnie over her own daughter. Alice and Ronnie also blame one another for what happened to the baby when they were 11. When another young biracial child goes missing from a local furniture store, police detectives Elizabeth Banks (who still hasn’t recovered from discovering the dead girl’s body in the earlier case) and Nate Parker come into town naturally turn to Alice and Ronnie (who haven’t really interacted with each other in years) as probable suspects. Common turns up as the stepfather of the missing child.

 

Sharing a little in common (both good and bad) with the frustrating Aussie drama “I Am You”, is this much better but flawed 2015 crime/drama flick. Directed by debut feature director Amy Berg (formerly a documentarian who made the thematically similar “West of Memphis”) and scripted by Nicole Holofcener (writer-director of “Friends With Money” and “Enough Said”), the adaptation of the Laura Lippman novel has enough going for it to be recommended, and I’m a bit surprised it bypassed cinemas here in Australia. Perhaps Elizabeth Banks, Diane Lane, and Dakota Fanning aren’t A-grade celebrity actresses, but they’d surely rank as B+ one would think.

 

The plot resembles a mixture of “I Am You” and the real-life Jamie Bulger murder case (even Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures”), so one should expect a fairly heavy-going, mature story on show here. The worldview we get here is kind of a similarly white trash view as seen in “Gone Baby Gone” but a different state in America. It’s really well-conveyed, and Diane Lane is particularly excellent in a somewhat against-type casting decision. I think the film is a little rougher on her character than I feel like being, but there’s no doubt that this is your typical mother who is hard on her own kid who is troubled and frumpy, whilst clearly favouring someone else’s child who is everything she wishes her own daughter would be. Whether Lane’s daughter is the way she is partly due to parental neglect or whether Lane is perhaps justified in being aloof towards her own daughter, is left somewhat ambiguous I think, and really interesting. However, there’s no doubt that this woman is absolutely not mother of the year material at all. It’s a really interesting character and Lane, although not the first person I’d think of to play a white trash mother, is terrific in the part.

 

Although her domestic scenes are a cliché, Elizabeth Banks is fairly solid, if unspectacular in a dramatic part. She’s fine, but the role doesn’t give her nearly as much to chew on as others in the cast are afforded with their characters. Her character also seems a bit thick, as she asks one of the supposed killers about the initial crime. What? Can’t you just get court transcripts or police interview transcripts from the time? That seemed really weird and unconvincing to me, through no fault of Banks’. Dakota Fanning, meanwhile is good in a very sad, affecting role. Rapper Common capably eschews his usual cool as ice persona to play much lower class here in a small role. You might not even recognise him sporting cornrows.

 

Unfortunately, the film comes saddled with two less persuasive performances. Nate Parker overplays it a bit as Banks’ partner who takes a disliking to his much lower-class equivalent in Common. It’s a clichéd role and I think Parker gives it just a tad too much juice to where he seems a bit unhinged. The bigger issue, though, is young Danielle MacDonald as the older incarnation of Lane’s chubby, sullen daughter. Although she’s not nearly as unrestrained as Ruth Bradley in “I Am You”, I think (a lot) less would’ve been so much more. Having said that, you do still feel sorry for her character in a pathetic kind of way. Put aside for a second what the girl may or may not have done, and you’ve still got a kid with low self-esteem being overlooked by her own damn mother. At least from MacDonald’s point of view, it seems like an act of cruelty on her mother’s behalf.

 

A good movie with an interesting crime/mystery plot, it would’ve been even better without a couple of unsubtle performances. Worth seeing for the basic story and an excellent turn by Diane Lane. It’s one of those films that will have you talking and debating with people afterwards. It’ll probably rile you up a bit at times, too with some of the behaviour on display by young and old. Worth seeking out.

 

Rating: B-