SLIFF 2009 Review: ST. NICK

It’s time to put the giant-sized Muppets in the closet.   Whereas WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, or, at least, Spike Jonze version of that story, is about the wondrous and magical places children transport themselves to when they are off on their own, David Lowery’s ST. NICK is about the realities children face when they can no longer live inside their own heads.   It’s a film about survival, not so much in the physical sense a la INTO THE WILD, but about the emotional and psychological survival one must endure when they are alone and wandering the world without experienced guidance.

Real-life siblings Savanna and Tucker Sears, who are without question captivating in every scene of the film, play a nameless girl and boy who have left their home behind.   In the film’s opening moments, the boy wanders aimlessly first into and then through a seemingly abandoned house.   They make it their own, ruffling through garbage bins for any sustenance they can muster (even though the boy is horrible at making sandwiches).   Soon, as the weather begins to turn on them, they find they must venture back out into the world, not really in search of anything but walking through a world that pays them very little attention.

ST. NICK is a film that does little over the course of its run time, a no burn film that will have audience members expecting charged narrative running for the doors.   That’s not at all what Lowery’s film is about.   It’s about capturing an emotion, displaying the minds of two children who want to be by themselves, but don’t want to be alone.   They have run away from their home, but there is never a reason given.   Don’t expect some grand exposition or startling revelation that ties everything together.   In the life of a child, there are rarely answers.   At least, none that ever truly make sense, and Lowery capture this, too.

Aided by the stark beauty created by cinematographer Clay Liford, Lowery creates a world full of dust and earth, and this gives the film a sense of grounding, a sense that tells us we are not to expect any grand illusions of childhood imagination.   The children in ST. NICK don’t want any part of magical kingdoms or far-away lands.   They see the world they are living in,   and they are trying to make it by themselves within it.   We don’t know why.   We aren’t ever supposed to understand why.   There are hints of it near the film’s climax, and, at this point, Lowery seems to abandon the initial construction his film was striving at.   It veers towards the crevasse of explanation ever so closely, but it pulls it back at the last minute, driving us further in the dark as the film, literally, cuts to black.

It is this sense of thematic time and place, of fully understanding the lives and the world it is showing us, that keeps a no-burn film like ST. NICK firmly in our interest.   Call it a kind of adverse possession Lowery creates in our minds.   Like the children squatting in a home that does not belong to them, the characters and this world rest in our heads for such an amount of time that, by the time the film is over, we find it comforting there.   Like the children in the film, the film in us seeks out a sense of belonging, and it finds it.

ST. NICK will screen at the Tivoli on Friday, November 13th at 7:15pm during the 18th Annual Whitaker Saint Louis International Film Festival.