‘Suncoast’ Movie Review: A Charming Indie About Grief
Photo from Searchlight Pictures
From Jeremy Kibler
Inevitably, the joke will be that Suncoast should have been called “Sundance: The Movie.” But that would be pretty facile and a glib insult to this sometimes quirky but mostly charming and sobering indie. For her semi-autobiographical feature debut, writer-director Laura Chinn takes personal inspiration from her own life during 2005 where the entire right-to-die debate involving Terri Schiavo is a bit more than just a backdrop. Nicely acted and naturally written, Suncoast is directed with a light touch without making light of death and grief.
The film centers on Doris (Nico Parker), a teenager in Clearwater, Florida. She lives with her high-strung, often-insensitive waitress mother, Kristine (Laura Linney), and lives to take care of her comatose brother Max (Cree Kara), who’s blind and dying of brain cancer. They move him to Suncoast Hospice, the same center where Terri Schiavo resides in a vegetative state with a storm of protestors and journalists right outside. Meanwhile, as Kristine decides to sleep on a mattress next to her son at Suncoast, Doris is left to her own devices at home. Just as she falls in with the group of popular kids at her private high school, Doris opens her empty home to them as a place to party.
Between Doris coming out of her shell and putting the mournful situation with her sibling in the background, the film also introduces Paul (Woody Harrelson). He’s a widower who starts protesting outside Suncoast. After a conversation over death in a diner, Doris strikes up a friendship with an older man. It’s never creepy, but rather warm and funny, thanks to the writing and Harrelson, who can’t help but be likable with his Southern drawl. One does wish Chinn’s script had pruned some of Doris’ interactions with her new friends and their fake IDs in exchange for more time with Paul. He already feels like a real person, but more scenes may have made him even more of a well-rounded character than a magical sounding board for wisdom about life being precious.
Nico Parker, a spitting image of mother Thandiwe Newton, is incredibly natural and moving as Doris, a seemingly invisible young woman who still stands up for herself. Parker stole our hearts in the first episode of The Last of Us, and she does it again here for an entire film. Laura Linney sometimes gives in to some melodramatic histrionics, even as a single mother with a dying child, but she does find shading and vulnerability as Kristine, particularly with scenes alongside an older grief therapist, Sue (Pam Dougherty), she mistakes for a patient. Everyone grieves differently—Kristine complains at Suncoast but only wants what’s best for her boy—and over the course of the film, Doris eventually confronts her loss. It doesn’t hit her right away; in a way, her brother is already dead.
Suncoast may have “Sundance Indie” written all over it, but not all of us attend Sundance every year, either. Compassionate but not schmaltzy, the film doesn’t take every well-trodden path. Are the ingredients familiar? Sure. What matters, though, is that writer-director Chinn brings enough specificity and personal touches to tell her own fully formed story. This may not be the most hard-hitting film about “pulling the plug,” but it makes you feel good without feeling talked down to in sappy platitudes.
Rating: 3.5/5
Suncoast hits Hulu on February 9, 2024.
