MANNY & LO
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Aleksa Palladino, Mary Kay Place. Screenplay: Lisa Krueger. Director: Lisa Krueger. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
There is nothing quite as sad for someone who loves movies as watching a rookie film-maker who really wants to say something, but turns out not to have very much to say, or appears unable to say it in a way that connects. Lisa Krueger states in the production notes for MANNY & LO that she began with questions of "what is motherhood" and "what is family made of," and you can tell that she is quite earnest about answering those questions. She has a Sundance Institute-approved screenplay, and all the studied quirkiness she can fit into 89 minutes. But Krueger has created a predictable story with characters who still look like they exist on 3x5 notecards on her desk. MANNY & LO is a comedy-drama without enough of either.
The title characters are two orphaned sisters: 16-year-old Laurel (Aleksa Palladino), known as Lo, and 11-year-old Amanda (Scarlett Johansson), known as Manny. Runaways from their respective and separate foster homes, Manny and Lo travel together, stealing groceries, gas and free lodging in model homes in an effort to stay a step ahead of the authorities. There is about to be a major hindrance introduced into their lifestyle, however. It turns out that Lo is pregnant, and into her third trimester before her deep denial gives way to reality. Desperate for someone to help them, Manny and Lo kidnap Elaine (Mary Kay Place), an employee at a maternity store who seems to know everything there is to know about babies, and hole up in an unoccupied mountain vacation home to hide out until Lo gives birth. Though they begin as enemies, the three develop an understanding, and slowly begin to become an unlikely family.
I suppose one of the things which irritated me most about MANNY & LO is that for an ostensibly original independent film, its basic premise has been done and done and done again. As comedy, think of RUTHLESS PEOPLE; as social drama, think of last year's WHITE MAN'S BURDEN. And those are just recent examples of stories which make the very Psych 101 observation that kidnapers and their hostages aren't always so different, and sometimes bond to fulfill their respective needs. MANNY & LO doesn't offer much of a twist on the movie truism that if the plot is about a kidnapping, abductors and abducted will go from antagonism to uneasy truce to friendship. There wasn't a moment when I didn't know exactly where Krueger was taking me.
Her only chance at selling MANNY & LO was to create characters who were interesting and worth spending time with in spite of the stock situation, and she doesn't exactly set the world on fire. Manny and Lo are like a collection of eccentric traits from a screen-writing exercise rather than fully realized people -- Manny collects pictures of happy families, is obsessive about time and measurements, and sprays her mother's preferred deodorant on whatever bed she is sleeping in; Lo likes to practice for her chosen career as flight attendant by standing on Manny's unstable back. Scarlett Johansson and Aleksa Palladino look adrift, young actors struggling to find the center of characters without a center; it is as though Krueger had built them a house with lovely curtains and landscaping, then didn't put up any walls. Mary Kay Place, a much more experienced performer, turns Elaine into something intriguing almost in spite of Krueger. There is a unique dignity about her, though there are carefully parceled out hints about a troubled past, and Place uses her own experience as a writer and director to fill in the blanks.
I think there is a tendency to give first-timers the benefit of the doubt on independent projects like this, because critics are usually aware of the limitations of time and money. I'm not sure that any of that matters to the audience. Lisa Krueger's intentions are good; she wants to explore what can make a dysfunctional family functional, and how whether or not you perceived your family as dysfunctional can determine the effect it has on you. She also leaves threads dangling, introduces characters who do little or nothing to advance the story (like Cameron Boyd as the terribly cute Chuck, who hands out his signature to Manny), and doesn't direct her script with an eye to making either the humor or the relationships as effective as they might have been. MANNY & LO is a slow, rather simple and not terribly entertaining film, and that doesn't change because Krueger is inexperienced, or a woman, or not working for a major studio.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 parent traps: 4.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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