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Andrea Riseborough's Performance In 'Nancy' Offsets The Loneliness Of The Film

Samuel Goldwyn Films

First-time feature director Grace Choe’s Nancy feels like it’s on downers. Most of the picture crawls through dark interiors; outside, the light is flat and lifeless, and there’s either an argument or a hunting accident. A harshly lit diner scene and a brief encounter in a supermarket don’t make the movie any cheerier.

Nancy (Andrea Riseborough) is a sad sack stuck in her life. She has a conflicted relationship with her hectoring, palsied mother, whom she cares for, resents and then snuggles up to for some hint of comfort. She has a temp job at a dentist’s office in a failing strip mall. She tells co-workers that she’s just back from a vacation in North Korea and has some photos that may or may not be genuine, and a story about how easy it was to be a tourist there that seems unlikely. She corresponds sympathetically, but under a false name, with a man (John Leguizamo) who has lost a child; she also pretends to be pregnant.

Nancy yearns for a life and an identity. She believes she was adopted, but when she looks in her mother’s birth certificate file, she finds an empty folder. Then, a story appears on local television news about a couple who lost an infant daughter 30 years earlier. They still hope for clues to the daughter’s disappearance and they’ve set up a foundation. The story runs with a photo of the little girl alongside a picture of how she might look now. Nancy thinks she could be that missing kid.

Director/writer Grace Choe and cinematographer Zoe White keep the camera close on faces that all look dead in the eyes. The mother of the kidnapped daughter (Ann Dowd, who played the horrifying Aunt Lydia in the recent version of The Handmaid’s Tale) has great hopes that Nancy is that child now grown, but the defeat in her eyes shows how hard it is for her to believe anything can come of their meeting. The father – an unusually restrained Steve Buscemi – has little to say. Nancy is a film with plenty of uncomfortable silences; when characters talk it’s with effort. Speech comes in low voices; characters hesitate because they don’t know what to say.

The close-ups keep you almost inside these stricken people. The film embodies their terrible loneliness, along with their simultaneous hope that Nancy is the missing daughter and the fear that she is not – which will only amplify their misery. The difficulty for all them is enormous. However, it turns out, though, it’s clear that Nancy is not a fraud; she just has no idea who she is, and she wants connection.

What lifts the film above the heap of grim low-budget independent American movies that should never have been made is Andrea Riseborough. Buscemi, Dowd and Leguizamo provide the support, but Riseborough is magnetic, even as her character shows almost no affect. Nancy is a movie of unremitting sadness, a sustained note that could drive an audience right up the wall, but you don’t want to turn away from this actress. She looks like a waif. When she dyes her hair blacker, combs her listless bangs and puts on makeup to go to the diner, it’s just pathetic, and hardly changes her looks at all. On a second meeting, Leguizamo says she looks different, and Nancy’s comment that she’s not wearing makeup would be a joke in a film with less emotional weight.

Nancy’s expression barely changes, except for slight intonations in her eyes, and hints that Nancy is completely conflicted and unrooted. She puts a photo of half of her face against half of the missing girl’s hypothetical photo and believes they match – which I think is not so obvious to viewers. But you can’t dodge the power of her need.

Your heart goes to all three of these people, wallowing in their own prisons, taking tentative steps to relieve their pain, with little indication that they will ever get there.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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