All We Had

All We Had

Rita and Ruthie are two peas in a pod. They shoplift together. They flee trouble as a unit. In their battered car, they eat fries and sleep when they have nowhere else to go, curled up next to each other in the back seat. They look like sisters. But Rita is the mother, Ruthie is the 14-year old daughter, and they’re the main characters of “All We Had,” Katie Holmes’ directing debut adapted from Annie Weatherwax’s 2015 novel.

Rita makes terrible choices in her life (if you can even call them choices) and runs away when things get tough, dragging Ruthie (Stefania Owen) behind her: This is where the movie starts. Mother and daughter picture a dream life together: they’ll move to Boston, into a house with a pool. Stranded in a small town after their car breaks down with no money and no place to stay, Rita and Ruthie are offered jobs at the local diner (after trying to leave without paying for their food). Marty (Richard Kind), the owner of the diner, and his transgender waitress niece Pam (Eve Lindley) are kind hearts, and the four become an impromptu family.

The film is narrated by Ruthie actually it has one of those overstating the obvious voiceover narrations that sounds like it’s geared toward young adults: “Bullies exist in every small town. People hate what they don’t understand.” Or: “Why is life always so hard? Especially at 15?” The narrator here is our “way into” the “point of view” of this movie, but there are many scenes without this character present at all.

Ruthie struggles to fit in at her new school; watching her manipulative mom work over one of her classmates until she gets Queen Bee approval is fascinating stuff but then it’s kind of dropped, because we have to follow Rita through her addiction and recovery. Rita starts dating a real estate developer (Mark Consuelos), who gets them into a house, while Ruthie looks on suspiciously, waiting for the other shoe to drop because the other shoe always drops.

Luke Wilson plays Lee, an alcoholic widower who frequents the diner. Luke Wilson has been around for a long time now; mostly connected with Wes Anderson’s films, he’s also had a lovely career playing essentially decent stand-up guys (“The Family Stone,” ‘’The Skeleton Twins,” “Meadowland.”) And playing “a decent guy” is not as easy as Luke Wilson makes it look. Most actors would find roles like these boring.

Where’s the twisty dark neuroticism that actors love to revel in? Where’s the “edginess”? But Wilson knows there is gold in these characters; In “All We Had,” when emotions come up in him, they come like an ambush: Suddenly out of nowhere he realizes he is about to cry and he is scared: Where did THAT come from? This feels like real life, not acting. He doesn’t have a huge role in “All We Had” but in every scene he brings a quiet sense of unmistakable authenticity.

Eve Lindley played the part of a small town waitress who wanted to move to New York City. Until she makes her move, she bides her time making crafts and putting up Youtube videos of herself lip synching to Queen songs. She’s a simple person, but she has a good heart, and so it is absolutely believable that she should become best friends with Ruthie that movie magic happens in ways that are wholly realistic sometimes. Holmes is very smart about who she puts on screen; even secondary or one off characters are well cast.

It is obvious why Katie Holmes would want to play a character like Rita, an irresponsible and reckless child-woman: Rita could still be deemed pretty if you ignored the rough skin, the missing molar, and the panicky eyes smudged around with blue liner. For the most part, Holmes avoids the condescending traps inherent in such a role, and plays it straight (she was so wonderful as T.S.’s love interest in “Coming Through The Rye”; I feel like I can trust her).

Owen is very good here too; especially when Ruthie feels protective of her mother giving her mother’s bad choices the side-eye because we’ve all been there before (or rather: we know how this ends).

The adaptation (by Josh Boone and Jill Killington) has no inference or mystery or discovery: it’s all text. Any complexity that there may be is all surface-level stuff; problems are easily solved since there’s nothing left unsaid OR if something is left unsaid then Ruthie says it for us in voiceover. “All We Had” was predictable because it felt like episodic television of the 1980s/90s variety. The words “It’s all going to be okay” (and variations thereof) were said aloud so many times I stopped counting after three.

“All We Had” takes place in a high-stakes economically devastated landscape, where everyone struggles with money and addiction and survival. The economic crash is so brutal that even Ruthie feels it, riding her bike past empty storefronts. But “All We Had” tiptoes back from that abyss: everything’s going to be okay.

Even artists have a way of keeping things low-stakes for themselves if they’re not rigorous about it. With her well meaning desire to create an inspirational story of survival and redemption (and, to be fair, she has succeeded), Holmes has kept the entire film extremely low-stakes you never doubt for one second that “everything is going to be okay.”

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