Dreams, interrupted

Comic and absurd, 'New Waterford Girl' a small triumph

In this story: Frustrated dreamer An outside influence RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Paul Tatara
CNN.com Reviewer

(CNN) -- Allan Moyle's "New Waterford Girl" is a lovely, offbeat coming-of-age story set in the 1970s that's somewhat reminiscent of Bill Forsyth's "Gregory's Girl" (1981).

Like Forsyth, Moyle constructs storylines that are full of oddball rhythms and half-recognized signifiers. His scenes often begin several beats after you'd expect them to, then rise and fall on scattershot pieces of information that are understood only by his bored, consistently perplexed characters.

Screenwriter Tricia Fish writes the most hilarious, enigmatic dialogue this side of a Coen brothers movie, and her utterly delightful sense of the absurd never fails her.

The denizens of New Waterford, Cape Breton -- there couldn't be more than 300 of them -- have surrendered themselves to lives of morbid immobility in their Nova Scotia town. Though they live under slate-gray skies along gorgeous coastline cliffs, their sense of beauty has been systematically diminished by their own inertia.

New Waterford's sole yearning inhabitant, an artistically inclined 15-year-old girl named Mooney Pottie (Liane Balaban), suspects that there's life beyond the nearest TV set or bottle of cheap wine. Mooney's desperate attempts to escape her no-win situation propel what's easily the best film to be released so far this year.

Rest assured that you've never seen anything quite like this. As crazy as it sounds, the movie's strength lies in its dead-on sense of reality.

Mooney really is moony, and she announces her dreaminess through gritted teeth. Her favorite teacher, Cecil Sweeney (Andrew McCarthy), fully recognizes Mooney's talents, to the point that he's developed a crush on her.

He roundly praises her avant-garde class presentations, and even goes so far as to send her projects to art schools in the states. One uproarious scene shows Mooney using abstract homemade dolls to illustrate black-lung disease for her benumbed, coal-mine-bound classmates.

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She also receives special recognition for including sparkles on the fallopian tubes that she draws in health class. Cecil's steadfast support doesn't do Mooney much good, though. When she's finally accepted to an art program in big, bad New York City, her parents refuse to let her go.

Mooney's family lives in a bright-blue clapboard house that seems more like a crummy storage unit than a real home. Her brothers and sisters view her as some sort of alien that's landed in the living room. And her endlessly frustrated mom and dad (entertainingly played by Mary Walsh and Nicolas Campbell) are convinced that she's crazy.

New Waterford is strictly Roman Catholic. Mooney's family, like the rest of the community, lives in mortal fear of the Almighty. Its would-be punk teen-agers are afraid to have sex for fear of ending up in hell; the girls who do get pregnant are immediately shipped away to give their babies up for adoption. It's commonplace for kids to cross themselves when confronted with anything that's the least bit worldly, though you can tell they'd be happy to embrace something different.

Enter Lou Benzoa (Tara Spencer-Nairn) and her blonde, mambo instructor mother (Cathy Moriarty, in what's basically a cameo.) The Benzoas have moved to New Waterford for inexact reasons. Lou's mom mentions that her ex-boxer husband is in prison, and that she and her daughter need to hang out in Nova Scotia until "the stink wears off."

Lou is from the Bronx, so you can imagine the stir she causes among her classmates. Soon, Mooney and Lou enter into a strange, halting friendship that releases Mooney from her invisible cage.

Lou pushes Mooney to go for the gold in a number of ways, including attending anemic little parties in which the kids dance poorly and view vomiting as a significant event. Eventually, Lou becomes something of a foul-mouthed Christ figure for the local girls when she determines that she's good at sucker-punching two-timing boyfriends. If they go down, she says, they're guilty. And they almost always go down.

Eventually, Lou's horizon-broadening attitude convinces Mooney to pull a ruse that will get her out of New Waterford, but quick. All hell breaks loose when she sets the plan into motion.

The performances, across the board, are remarkable. Balaban, who looks like a lankier, less-fragile variation on Winona Ryder, is very good at displaying utter rage beneath her glumness. You can fully understand why a grown man, especially one who's trapped in this particular town, would pine for her. There's humor in her eyes when she's angry, and anger when she's smirking at the folly that swirls around her.

Spencer-Nairn is just as good. Her tough-girl demeanor is leavened by a sweetness that appears when you least expect it to. She seems honestly baffled by the other kids' self-imposed trepidation, and her blows to the jaw are delivered with a palpable sense of righteousness.

It's a shame that this movie won't be getting the kind of broad release that vastly inferior films receive on a weekly basis. If it's playing where you live, drag as many of your friends as you can to see it, and remember to rent it on video if you can't see it now.

Moyle and Fish both deserve huge careers. Fish, in particular, will be fighting to retain her unique voice once Hollywood executives go to work on her. In that way, she's a great deal like Mooney (Her script is partially autobiographical).

We all have our New Waterfords to contend with, and some are much more powerful -- and idiotic -- than others.

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