‘Prisoner’s Daughter’ Movie Review: Strong Actors Sell Soapy Material
Photo from Vertical
From Jeremy Kibler
Not that director Catherine Hardwicke ever went anywhere, but Prisoner’s Daughter is her pleasing return to indie filmmaking. A father-daughter redemption drama suiting Hardwicke’s tough, intimate sensibilities, the film has Brian Cox and Kate Beckinsale, so we’re already off to a good start. Sure, name-brand talent can have its limits, but Cox and Beckinsale’s performances really do elevate the soapy material here. It’s affecting, if unremarkable, and it’s not Mafia Mamma.
Single mom Maxine (Beckinsale) is doing the best she can. She’s behind on the mortgage of her childhood home in Las Vegas and can barely afford the anti-seizure medication for her 12-year-old son Ezra (Christopher Convery), who has epilepsy. She works two jobs, relying on tips at her waitress job and working nights cleaning up backstage where she used to be a showgirl. When her deadbeat ex-husband Tyler (Tyson Ritter), a drug-addicted musician living in an “artist co-op,” causes her to lose her one job, the struggle becomes a cycle. Ezra is also getting picked on at school but gets detention for getting beaten up. Finally, Maxine receives a call from her estranged father Max (Cox), who gets a compassionate release from 12 years in prison because he’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and only has four or five months to live. Max wants to live out the remainder of his days on house arrest with his daughter and his grandson. Maxine is, of course, less welcoming, but she could charge him as a tenant since she needs the money. They’re blood but they haven’t been family in a while.
Prisoner’s Daughter is pretty much an acting showcase, but a very solid one. Brian Cox can’t help but just show up and command the screen. As Max, he’s playing a man of violence but not quite that same man anymore. Cox conveys pangs of guilt, convincing the viewer he does actually want to support Maxine and Ezra in any way he can for the time he has left. Kate Beckinsale hasn’t been this good in a dramatic role in a while, and she really brings every ounce of raw authenticity to Maxine who’s consistently trying to stay afloat. Beckinsale’s monologue to Max could have just felt like a big, transparent Oscar Clip™, but the tears feel earned and we can really feel the history between them. Christopher Convery is even very likable as Ezra, who eventually says the darnedest things that precious movie kids do, and Ernie Hudson is a reliable presence in a couple of scenes as a boxing gym owner, one of Max’s trustworthy old friends. The one weak link happens to be Tyson Ritter, who convinces as a drummer (being the lead vocalist for rock band The All-American Rejects) but less so as a drug addict.
The script by Mark Bacci does give us a pretty full sense of Max and Maxine’s fractured relationship and how Maxine was always left to pick up the pieces even as a child, having to care for her alcoholic mother. Hardwicke’s direction is polished but also recalls bits of the gritty realism and hand-held camerawork as showcased in her 2003 debut Thirteen, along with an earthy sense of place for the film’s working-class Nevada milieu.
For a story about a terminally ill ex-con reconciling with his daughter, a struggling single mother with an epileptic son and a drug addict for an ex, it all sounds like the stuff of clichéd melodrama. There is a lot of ground to cover, not to mention Ezra being bullied at school, but surprisingly, it’s all more low-key than melodramatic, at least for a while. Not until a blow-up at a backyard birthday party does the film snowball the last half of the film into violence, although that incident does carry the film to its inevitable conclusion. When it’s not breaking out the hokey plot machinations, Prisoner’s Daughter really does work for the fine performances.
Prisoner’s Daughter hits theaters on June 30, 2023.
Rating: 3/5
