Carrie (1976)

The story of Carrie White is one that I always found very sad and sympathetic.  Her home life is terrifying; she seems to have been regularly abused, mentally, verbally and physically by her overly religious mother.  This seems to have affected her social skills, and she hides behind her flat hair in a meek shell.  At school, she is the subject of senseless bullying and torment.  She’s an easy target for the other girls, who seem like they could make the cast of Mean Girls gasp in horror at their antics.  When she finally finds her ability to fight back, it may be more than she can handle, and anyone who crosses her will pay dearly.

The film begins with a scene that feeds into any school yard outcast’s nightmares.  While showering after gym class, Carrie (Sissy Spacek) discovers she is bleeding.  We realize it is only her first period, but she has no knowledge of this process and goes into hysterics, begging her classmates for help.  They laugh and start pelting her with feminine hygiene products, chanting “Plug it up!” while poor Carrie cowers in the shower, certain she’s dying.  The cruelty and humiliation is almost too much to bear, and Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) is not much protection.

After the incident, one girl feels sorry for Carrie while another hates her more than ever.  Sue (Amy Irving) decides to do a good deed and let her popular boyfriend take Carrie to the senior prom.  When Chris (Nancy Allen) hears of it, she makes sure Carrie’s prom experience is one no one will ever forget.

What makes this a horror film is Carrie’s new found power of telekinesis and the shocking mother-daughter relationship.  The telekinesis seems to be a milestone that arrives with her new step into womanhood.  Moments of intense fear, anger or aggression seem to trigger random accidents around her: a light bulb bursting, an ashtray flying off a desk or a boy falling off his bike.  All the while her powers grow stronger.  At home, Carrie’s life feels like an oppressive hell.  Her mother, Margaret (Piper Laurie), beats her with religious texts, drags her across the floor and locks her in a closet to pray to a disturbing image of Christ with glowing eyes and arrows sticking out of him.

Some of the best scenes of the film are at Carrie’s home featuring the troubling mother-daughter dynamic.  Both Spacek and Laurie were Oscar nominated for their performances.  Spacek brings out Carrie’s vulnerability and constant fear so well.  Later when Carrie starts to assert herself more and be more comfortable around her peers, it’s refreshing and a triumph.  To contrast, Laurie’s portrayal of a this terrifying mother gives me the creeps perfectly.  When she gets on a roll with her quotes about sin, nothing can stop her, she becomes a force.  While her character can seem so outlandish, Laurie makes her believable, like a nightmare you cannot shake.

While Carrie is not your typical slasher or supernatural scary movie, it is an essential and a classic.  It was based off of Stephen King’s debut novel and does the work justice.  If while watching the film, you feel weighted down in the focus on the social world of Carrie’s high school, just wait until the end.  The ending makes it all worth it.

“Pimples are the Lord’s way of chastising you.”

Tender Mercies

While Terms of Endearment is your quirky girl-time tear-jerker that mothers and daughters can paint their toes to, Tender Mercies is your stronger, quieter type of family drama that the men won’t immediately flee from.

Robert Duvall plays Mac Sledge, a broken down middle-aged man who was once a great country singer.  The first image we see of him is a drunk silhouette in a motel room fighting over a bottle of booze, then we see his greasy bald head pass out on the floor.  It seems that somewhere on that floor, Mac realized he was nowhere and needed to get back up.  He’s got no money and nowhere to go, so he humbly asks the motel owner Rosa (Tess Harper) if he can work for her.  She’s a kind woman and they can help each other out.

This little motel on the side of a dusty road is in the middle of nowhere under the big Texas sky.  It looks like one of the loneliest places in the world, and maybe it is.  It’s just Rosa and her son Sonny (Allan Hubbard) who live there and they’re all the family each other has.  Sonny’s father was killed in Vietnam when he was just a baby, leaving Rosa a widow at eighteen.  And Sonny is getting to a curious age where he’s asking more and more questions about the father he never knew.

As Mac works for Rosa, he becomes part of the family.  It’s nearly odd how Mac so quietly becomes a part of Rosa and Sonny’s life.  We’ve hardly seen a conversation with Rosa before Mac asks to marry her.  But maybe that’s just how it is here in dusty lonely Texas, there’s no need for long winded conversations and you can really hear the few people your around much better.

Mac and Rosa are married before we even know about Mac’s troubled past.  He was once married to Dixie (Betty Buckley) who’s still a successful country singer and they have a daughter who’s nearly eighteen.  Mac writes a new song, gives it to Dixie hoping she can make some use out of it and hopes to see his daughter.  When Dixie throws the song in Mac’s face and refuses to let him see his daughter, it nearly drives Mac to the bottle again.

While this is a story about Mac getting his life back together, it seems he’s not always ready to just plunge into the waters.  When his daughter comes out to the motel to meet him, it’s not exactly hugs, tears and sweeping violins.  The air feels stifling in that little yellow living room as she tries to share her life with Mac.  She tells him about her boyfriend, how her mother disapproves and asks if it was him who used to sing her a certain lullaby.  Mac lies and says he doesn’t remember it, like he’s just not ready to be that fond memory for her.  Yet in the field across the street, under the wide blue sky, Rosa and Sonny talk easily.  Maybe they just have more air to breathe.

Now, there are a few things you can probably guess will happen in this film, but there are a few sucker punches that make this film feel real, not like some after school special.  This is a bleak, spread out and lonely world where second chances don’t come along so easily.  It seems that girls get married too early and it never works out.  Many dads never come back home and leave kids with so many questions.  So you can’t ask for much and you’ll only be disappointed if you expect too much.  In Tender Mercies, you’ve got to hold onto whatever little happiness you can find.

“I don’t trust happiness. I never did, I never will.”