Archaeology of a Woman

Archaeology of a Woman

Sally Kirkland boasts nearly 200 credits on her IMDb page, one of which is “Archaeology of a Woman,” made in 2012 but only now receiving a weeklong release at the Quad Cinema. She plays Margaret, a former journalist who’s starting to show signs of dementia. The movie begins with an effectively disorienting opening scene: Margaret slowly wanders around the parking lot of a store, trying to find her car. Her illness has progressed enough that she knows tricks to get out of tough situations like approaching a cop and cannily smiling at him while spinning some tale about lost keys and then sitting there until officers take her home, where they find her car in the driveway.

But how did she get there? She doesn’t know; neither do we. Director-writer Sharon Greytak keeps us in the dark over plot points here, so that often we’re as confused as Margaret which might be OK if the plot gradually revealed itself to us as she slipped away from her own consciousness. Instead, “Archaeology of a Woman” doesn’t build but lurches forward in fits and starts as awkward as its title until whatever investment we’ve made in Margaret and her secrets starts to die away.

Eventually Kate (Victoria Clark), Margaret’s daughter, is brought into deal with her mother’s increasing fogginess. Kate is a chef (an ever-popular movie profession), and everything this character does is absurdly unconvincing, especially falling into romance with a cop (Karl Geary) who takes an inexplicable instant interest in Margaret’s welfare.

Kate has been given random sexual scenes to play; when she’s at the restaurant where she works, she says “chef-like” things such as “That needs more tarragon” to her underlings in the kitchen. Her entire subplot starts making even less sense than Margaret’s story does when it dissolves into a paranoid thriller after TV news reports about dead bodies have been unearthed.

At the very least, this wobbly little movie gives Kirkland a chance to turn in a fully lived in performance, and she seizes it, going topless several times and keeping up a furious sort of intensity that suggests her character has an inner monologue running at all times. The lightness of Kirkland’s work here is its strength that and its vulnerability, its touches of the flirtatious and the comic.

There are moments in which some pixie impishness seems to shine through from Kirkland’s beginnings as an actress in 1960s Greenwich Village theater, when anything and everything was allowed. Margaret may be sick, but she isn’t just a case study; Kirkland insists on her humanness and her individuality. There’s something funny-disturbing about a scene where cops find her outside in her black slip and she insists on telling them all about herself which hints that Margaret may have had an Andy Warhol superstar inside of her all along.

However, Kirkland is disappointed by the film because it requires her to perform many scenes in which Margaret throws a fit and screams at people. Any such scene loses our attention for any mystery that might need solving and gains our interest in getting her locked up so she can receive treatment and not hurt herself or others. Some good acting from Kirkland, but her Margaret needed a different screenplay than what she got with this film.

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