By Meredith Alloway · May 13, 2012
The first thing that drew me to this movie was the cast. Chloe Moretz? Yes. Blake Lively…skeptical but intrigued. Add in Eddie Redmayne? SOLD. There’s this trend lately where directors right out of the film festival success womb are handed a lucky lot. Before the doctor can even slap them to life, they get a brilliant cast, a loaded script and producer backers looking on in anticipation. And in this case, Derick Martini wasn’t quite ready to handle his lucky hand.
Hick, despite its impressive performances, is a little bit of a mess. When a film decides to take on a touchy subject, in this case child rape, murder and abuse, red flags fly. I should’ve known before I even walked into the theatre. The way the film has been marketed scares me a little. This is not a film for kids, but with the colorful poster of tween icons like Moretz and Lively, it may attract the wrong crowd. No, 12-yr-old little girl, Blake Lively is not shopping on 5th Avenue in her Jimmy Choos in this one…
Teenager Luli McMullen (Moretz) decides to run away from home. Fueled by fantasies of the bright lights of Las Vegas and the movies she’s memorized by heart, she leaves behind her alcoholic parents and hitchhikes west. The characters she meets along the way may be worse than the family she wanted to escape.
First, there’s Eddie the cowboy (Redmayne) who is equally as terrifying as he is charming. Then, there’s Glenda, a coke-head drifter who showers Luli with false affection. Luli begins to trust that Glenda will look after her, but when they meet her husband, the unstable and sleezy Lloyd (Ray McKinnon), she abandons her, or so it seems.
Luli is left with Eddie, a gimp whose motives slowly become increasingly questionable. As we watch Luli sink deeper and deeper into adulthood, we realize this coming of age story moves faster than most. In only a few weeks, this young girl sees more than most do in a lifetime.
But what’s the point? It seems as if Andrea Portes knew, who wrote the novel and also adapted the screenplay, but Martini did not. Luli is given a pistol on her 13th birthday at the beginning of the film, and even worse, her parents let her keep it. She’s on the brink of sexuality but still naïve when it comes to trust. It’s a recipe for disaster…and that’s not a bad thing. Movies deal with heavy issues all the time. But Martini can’t seem to face them head-strong. In a scene where Luli is put through the worst possible act of sexual abuse, the camera pans over a quiet, serene cornfield. When she witnesses a brutal murder, Bob Dylan underscores the terrorizing scene. It just doesn’t work. We’re constantly distracted from the true horror and gravity of Luli’s situation by art-house, indie directorial flavor. Yup, fresh out of that festival womb. But that’s not to say Martini doesn’t have moments of promise, because he does.
And the actors can’t be ignored either. They keep the film from drifting into oblivion, in other words, a pulp of gory nothingness. Moretz is appallingly good. At times you have to snap yourself back to reality, and remember she’s 15 and not 40. Her eyes are wise, but her face still refreshingly young. If she can take on this material, I’m eager to see what she can’t do. And Lively, who’s been drenched in the molasses that is a Gossip Girl script, completely proves herself. She’s beautiful, peppy, melancholy and broken all at once. And she continues to be strangely captivating. Redmayne continues his stretch of impressive work after Broadway in Red and in My Week With Marilyn. You’d never know this complex, handsome, toxic, terrifying young cowboy is actually a Brit.
The worst part about Hick? Knowing that all these great performances will never be seen because the movie is so “meh.” And I didn’t even get to the cameos…
Ryan Mason · May 13, 2012
