Adopt a Highway

Adopt a Highway

Russell Millings (Ethan Hawke), when he comes out of prison, is a flinching caricature of institutionalized behavior. His cringing at being spoken to. Shuffling instead of walking. Staying in a dump of a motel and working as a dishwasher, treating his boss like she’s a prison guard submissive, terrified. Then one windy night (the pathetic fallacy is strong) while taking out the trash he finds an infant girl in the dumpster. There’s a note with her: “Her name is Ella.” This all happens within the first 15/20 minutes of “Adopt a Highway,” a debut feature written and directed by Logan Marshall Green.

The film opens with a collage of voices President Bill Clinton saying we need to be “tough on crime,” talking about the three-strikes law and mandatory sentencing for drug-related crimes. The so called War on Drugs was an absolute failure; it put people away for way too long for minor offenses. People are still in prison essentially just for being addicts, or even just adjacent to addicts (“The Sentence,” a documentary about one family’s attempt to get their loved one out of jail, is really about how batshit crazy mandatory sentences are).

Many states have overturned laws like three strikes now, but that does nothing for someone like Russell, who got 25 years for having an ounce on him. He comes back into what is almost literally another world than when he left he’s never been on the internet before; doesn’t know what Google is; his parents died while he was inside; he blinks into sunlight like he’s some mole man.

Finding Ella kicks this tender story into gear, and it’s such a whopper plot move it feels like something from an entirely different film. Russell doesn’t call the police; he takes Ella “home” with him and tries to care for her himself. She has been abandoned, her future wiped out by what was done to her. The connections Russell may feel here are not hard to draw.

Russell, a child-man who won awards as a teenager for his participation in an “Adopt a Highway” campaign, has no past either, and not much of a future. The scenes between the two have real intimacy, even charm; but it’s quite a detour from those haunting opening sequences where Russell walks around squinting at this vast-seeming world so big now, so unfamiliar through which he rides roller coasters just because they’re there; staring agog at the blinking lights; gasping at the sheer heady freedom of it all.

There are other incidents, other things that happen to Russell (Logan Marshall-Green), but “Adopt a Highway” never fully comes together. It starts itself from bit to bit, and not like a good episodic that takes pleasure in stringing you along with self-contained stories. Patching it all up is Hawke’s performance — rusty with the weight of injustice, awkward about authority figures in general, passive so people take a second look at him and then step back again. His hair is lank, his salt-and-pepper beard thick, and pain and confusion hover over him like a migraine aura; they practically shimmer.

There’s also an episode set in an Internet cafe that I loved an employee shows Russell what email is; then he asks if he can take a picture with him. This creature who has never been on the Internet before.

Sensitive sequences like this one abound throughout the film: Hawke sharing scenes with Betty Gabriel (so unforgettable as the housekeeper in “Get Out”), who plays an employee of CPS; or meeting with his parole officer; or anyone “in charge.” Ethan Hawke works deep. I mean you can see how deep he goes.

But those sections keep pointing toward something more cogent than what we’re given here. They suggest directionality without providing any themselves, and by the time we get to Russell’s redemption narrative they’ve taken their toll. “Ella” is just the first chapter of his wanderings.Advertisement

And finally finally! there’s some sunlight. Jason Isbell scored this movie, and it’s incredible. He takes disparate episodes and builds them into emotional through lines better than most screenwriters could hope for.

Still, credit where credit’s due: Marshall Green has put together a team.Twinkling carnival lights! Wide desert spaces! Morning sunlight!

They’re all touched by Pepe Avila del Pino’s cinematography, which is does not just make them look magical or strange, or daunting, which they must look to Russell but makes them feel that way, too.

Watch Adopt a Highway For Free On Gomovies.