American Woman is a 2019 drama about a woman who raises her young grandson after her daughter goes missing.
Out in rural Pennsylvania, Debra (Sienna Miller) is making the best with what she can, a single mom raising her sixteen-year-old daughter Bridget (Sky Ferreira), herself a teen mother with infant son Jessie. Debra gets around, trying to party away her stress, having an affair with a married man, keeping a frazzled relationship with her sister Katherine (Christina Hendricks), living across the street. However, when Bridget doesn’t come home one night after a date, Debra is initially angered, but soon comes to realize her daughter has gone missing. Time passes, and investigations stall, weeks turning to years, and Debra is faced with a devastating reality, desperate to find Bridget while taking care of her grandson.
All of this has a number of trappings that could easily topple it into overwrought melodrama, but director Jake Scott, working from a script by Brad Ingelsby, stays just this side of sappy, the familiar story given greater weight by its commitment to authenticity. That begins with Debra, a woman clearly feeling she’s been deprived of much in life, happy with her daughter but overwhelmed by the mounting responsibility and a crushing loneliness. She doesn’t always make the right choices either, earning a reputation for her promiscuous ways. In the wake of her loss, she finds herself ever more in need to be taken care of, leaving her on a path dotted with men unable to fulfil her.
This is charted over a decade, where Debra relies on Katherine, her husband Terry (Will Sasso), and the girl’s mother (Amy Madigan), though it’s less a story of a woman looking for her daughter than what it does to her that she’s missing. Debra collapses through a series of troubling rings in her acceptance, finding herself in relationships with Ray (Pat Healy), a stable but abusive man who enjoys his role as breadwinner but with little tolerance for anything else. Then later, Chris (Aaron Paul), who bonds better with Jessie but not without temptations, but Debra is never out of the shadow of pain that has come to define her, even as she works to better herself.
There are sturdy performances from the entire cast, but this is Miller’s show, carrying the film from frame one, giving Debra a haunting thinness that envelopes her with genuine ache. This is a powerful piece of acting that takes a few risks but doesn’t pander to expectations. You absolutely feel for this character, the flaws that shape her softening as the years pass, she finding ways to evolve in a circle of that presses hard to keep her stuck in the past.
American Woman is a hard movie, rough edges purposefully meant to keep this as un-glamorous as possible. These are real people with real hopes and sorrow, and while it may linger in that truth longer than most, it is this attention to the humanity of despair and survival that keeps it so emotionally impactful. It’s a traumatic, personal story that doesn’t comprise itself for minute. If you’ve been looking for something grounded, deeply satisfying, and devoid of bombastic action, this is it. American Woman is one to watch.