Sunlight Jr.

The bleakness of this film is saved from being straight-up depressing by the strong performances of the two leading actors. Matt Dillon and Naomi Watts play Melissa and Richie, a Florida couple who are very much in love but struggling to live below the poverty line.

Melissa works a shitty job at Sunlight Jr., the convenience store that gives the film its title. Richie, now in a wheelchair after an accident, draws disability cheques and tries to sell repaired DVD players to the local pub owner.

This is the kind of gritty social realism that British films are more often made of. There is no happy ending here, though the couple’s flaccid determination is poignant. The cycle of poverty they are living in is starkly conveyed. Richie drives Melissa to work one day only to run out of gas halfway there. They can’t afford to fill the tank so she has to run to work in the rain, she is late and subsequently harassed by her boss. It’s a grungy, unromantic portrait of contemporary life in a country that lacks social welfare and universal access to healthcare.

When Melissa loses her job the couple has to move out of the motel they live in to stay with her mum, who uses the pension she receives for fostering children on booze and cigarettes. These are the layers of economic and psychological stress that grind people down. It’s a shitty world Melissa and Richie live in, with not much to look forward to day by day. The horrible rut they’re in looks like changing when the couple get some news they think will turn things around for them.

Naomi Watts and Matt Dillon are interesting casting decisions. Despite being, in reality, a fair bit older than the seemingly 20-somethings of the characters they play, as an in-love couple they are swoon-worthy, and, like Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine, their charisma in conveying these bleak lives carries the film. They are a well-matched pair, conveying a sexual excitement between them that is the couple’s only saving grace in their depressing world.

Norman Reedus, who plays a psychopathic ex of Melissa’s, also does a good job, and while he doesn’t have much in the way of script to work with, he does well in putting out an ominous vibe. Sunlight Jr. is a bleak film but it doesn’t leave you completely hollow, thanks to an honest script and the actors’ well-pitched performances that are the strongest aspects of the film.

Sunlight Jr.

Director: Laurie Collyer
DVD Release date: 2 April, 90 mins