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Gas Food & Lodging
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by Sony Pictures
Sales Rank: 32952
Price: $19.98
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American independent director Allison Anders made her name with this keenly observed tale of a single mother and her two daughters stuck in the truck-stop town of Laramie, New Mexico, barely a fly speck on the never-ending desert horizon. Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk star as sisters Trudi and Shade, who couldn't be more different. Trudi rebels against her mother and her soul-numbing life through sex and develops a reputation among the boys for being easy. Shade is the "good girl" who escapes through the overripe Mexican melodramas in the town's largely vacant theater. Brooke Adams, a loving mother hardened by rejection and a demanding job as a truck-stop waitress, tries to hide her loneliness and disappointment and set Trudi on a better path, but as with so many relationships in this film, conflict brings out the worst in them. Anders, a single mother herself, drew on her own experiences to enrich her adaptation of Richard Peck's novel <I>Don't Look and It Won't Hurt</I>, and she brings a haggard understanding to the strained relations between mother and daughter and the bleak desolation to the lives of three women trapped by circumstance, economics, and landscape, but she also reaches deep into the characters to expose their yearnings and steel their resolve. No knight in shining armor for these women, but Anders allows them to make their way through the emotional landscape with pluck and determination. <I>--Sean Axmaker</I>
Viewer Reviews
Gas Food Lodging (Allison Anders, 1992)
I'm easy, I admit it. I'll watch any movie in which Ione Skye appears topless. Lovely woman, she is. Of course, the movie being directed by Allison Anders helps. Lovely movies, she makes.
This one concerns a mother (Brooke Adams) raising her two children, the wild older one (Skye) and the bookish younger one (Fairuza Balk) in a little town in the desert. There's young love, there's heartbreak, there's weird, malformed prejudice and hints of magic. Then their father (James Brolin) comes back into the picture, and everyone's world gets turned upside down.
Anders has a reputation for making deeply personal, quirky films (Things Behind the Sun, Grace of My Heart, etc.), and Gas Food Lodging is no different. It rambles, basically plotless for much of its length, around these three characters, their friends and adversaries. If you like your films with a good, solid plot, this one's not for you. But Anders has a certain magic touch that seems to work well with the slice-of-life films she so often helms; she is capable of crafting characters the viewer can identify with and care about, and that makes all the difference. I liked this movie a great deal, perhaps more than any of Anders' other movies I've seen, and I definitely recommend it. *** ½
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