Every so often, the movies like to argue with themselves by dropping two versions of the same story within spitting distance of one another: “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” “Deep Impact,” and “Armageddon.” The one-two punch of Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket” and Jamie Dack’s “Palm Trees and Power Lines” is, for clarity’s sake, nothing like dueling dumb-dumb disaster spectacles, but to consider Dack’s film without considering Baker’s is both impossible – everyone at Sundance is doing it– and frankly careless (but mostly impossible).
“Palm Trees and Power Lines,” an adaptation of Dack’s 2018 Cannes short of the same name, stars Lily McInerny as Lea, a detached, bored teenager living in what might be Florida – the state claiming the most palm trees in the country – but which, for Dack’s purposes, may as well be Anywhere, USA. She has little interest in doing much other than lazing under the sun, zoning out on her phone, or hanging out with her friend, Amber (Quinn Frankel), and their high school clique of idiot boys. One night the gang goes to a diner and, in a moment of shitty teen rebellion, dash; Lea is caught by an angry line cook, then rescued by Tom (Jonathan Tucker), a man twice her age. He drives her home. They exchange numbers. The transaction occurs with a casual ease as if Lea either doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into or doesn’t really care.
READ MORE: Sundance 2022 Preview: 20 Must-See Movies From The Festival
It’s a little bit of column “A” and a little bit of column “B.” Where Baker focuses on how an environment shapes a sexual predator and nestles into predation’s psychology, Dack focuses on the opposite side of predatory relationships: She wants to tell the story of the prey. There’s a reason Lea gravitates toward Tom. Most obviously, he arrives like a knight in shining armor when she needs one. The man knows how to make an entrance. He’s a sharp-looking fellow, too, sculpted and neatly groomed, and a walking good time on top of everything else. Lea’s so isolated from her friends and from her own mother, Sandra (Gretchen Mol), who can’t find a guy worth a damn to save her life, that Tom strikes a compelling enough figure that Lea ignores her better judgment and starts going out with him.
Dack is not a scold. Her message isn’t “parents, mind your children.” Even if Sandra was present, even if Lea did get along with kids her age, Tom might still find a way to dig his hooks into her; that she’s so alone makes her easy pickings, which is what all the world’s Toms look for when they want to groom a girl. “Palm Trees and Power Lines” installs the necessary building blocks for a dynamic like Lea and Tom’s to settle on and then slowly takes that dynamic to its natural conclusion. It’s the arc leading to the conclusion where the film hits hardest. Tom has a script memorized for seducing young, vulnerable girls, a well-practiced series of lines that start with flattery and end with command.
“You’re so pretty. I feel like I can be myself with you. I love you. Am I seeing other girls? You’re the only girl for me. Don’t you trust me? I want to hear you say it. I want to be the one who takes care of you. I’m the only person you need.” On a road trip to, once again, Anywhere, USA, his designs for Lea come into full view in a long take sequence where the camera stays static – all the better for stirring our nausea. Dack understands that the predator nickel and dimes his target, giving little and taking more, more, more until he’s actually all she has. His control over her becomes absolute.
Almost. “Palm Trees and Power Lines” begins with Lea fleeing a diner and ends more or less the same way, but suffice to say, relationships like the one she’s lured into with Tom are strong. The professional relationship McInerny develops with Tucker is strong, too. It must be. They’re dramatizing a toxic and too-real situation together. Tucker, for his part, is icky. This is a compliment. Tom has to be distasteful. We in the audience can smell the sleaze wafting off of him like body spray, even at his sweetest and most gentlemanly. Lea’s senses aren’t as keen as ours, but Dack’s direction avoids robbing her of agency and personality. McInerny is one to watch; she expresses the same smitten naivety as Natalia Dyer did in “I Believe in Unicorns,” but in a brief flash toward the movie’s end, she also shows cold rage in the downturn of her lips like Anya Taylor-Joy.
So as not to put overwhelming pressure on McInerny: She’s neither Dyer nor Taylor-Joy, and that’s okay because she’s Lily McInerny. Dack chose her lead wisely. “Palm Trees and Power Lines” needs an actor capable of maintaining a rigid spine through terrible abuse, and McInerny provides. Rather than cast light in the darkness of Dack’s material, McInerny projects a fortitude that belies her wiry frame and Lea’s demonstrable lack of any real power in her servitude to Tom. Her job is complicated. McInerny makes sense of the complications with grace, a stark contrast to the blunt-force effect of Dack’s style. Fearsome and fearless at the same time, “Palm Trees and Power Lines” practically dares viewers to watch what’s happening on screen without flinching. [A]
Follow along with all our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.