hilary brougher Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Stephanie Daley revolves around the actions of its titular character, a quiet, well-spoken sixteen-year-old girl played by Amber Tamblyn, who gets herself pregnant on the first try, carries the child to term and then delivers it in an isolated bathroom during a ski trip and suffocates it with toilet paper. Collapsing from blood loss in the snow minutes afterwards, her situation is immediately discovered and becomes a sensation for the media, which tags her with one of those disposable, insensitive monikers designed to grab a fickle audience and hold them for a few minutes: 'the ski mom.' In a neat dramatic contrivance, Daley, as preparation for her criminal trial, is ordered to be evaluated by 40-something forensic psychologist Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton) who is heavily pregnant after a long and draining struggle to be so -- a struggle that included a prior pregnancy resulting in stillbirth. We eventually learn that, against the wishes of her now distant husband, Lydie chose to have that stillborn disposed of like medical waste rather than be given a name or a funeral service.

Tamblyn's role in Stephanie Daley's double act is largely a thankless one, since her task is to be mostly inscrutable during her interview sessions with Swinton's character, giving the audience no 'in' as to why an otherwise mannered, seemingly thoughtful girl would take such a drastic step to rid herself of a baby instead of seeking out an abortion or carrying and then giving it up for adoption. When Stephanie does speak, she often talks about being judged by God or spouts one-liners so loaded as to make the audience feel that they may be watching a character trying to make a play for an insanity defense -- at one point, she casually references a 'jinx' that hovers over her existence. Are we supposed to view Stephanie as remarkably contemplative for her age or just as a teenager who has seen enough Law & Order to know that she better come up a damn good reason for why she did what she did? That there's no clear answer is dramatically intriguing up to a point, but it's also frustrating.

Stephanie Daley is the strongest proof I've seen this year that the Sundance Lab – designed to give emerging filmmakers the creative and financial support they need to raise their game – is doing something right. The film is beautifully – and by all appearances expensively – shot, and its cast (toplined by executive producer Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn, whose rabid Joan of Arcadia fanbase surely helped to get this film made) is full of name actors, and from afar it has every visual marker of a high-gloss, commercial thriller. But writer-director Hilary Brougher (she was last here in 1997, with her debut, The Sticky Fingers of Time) has hardly made a Hollywood confection. Daley is essentially a non-linear case study of the psychological swirl around two parellel pregnancies: that of Lydie, a 40-ish forensic psychologist whose marriage and psyche are still recovering from a stillbirth, and the mysterious case of the title character (Tamblyn), a high schooler on trial for throwing her newborn daughter in a trash can. Right before her scheduled pregnancy leave, Lydie is asked by the prosecutor's office to conduct a series of examinations with Stephanie, who claims innocence and refuses to take a plea deal. It's Liddy's job to get Stephanie to talk, and the young girl's story, told through flashback, is woven through the older woman's trepidatious third trimester, as she worries for health, doubts her husband's fidelity, and tries to come to terms with the child she's already lost. The material, in different hands, could have easily have drifted into Lifetime movie territory, but Brougher brings a fearless spirit to the thing. There's a rawness to Stephanie Daley that we rarely see in American film – it paints slick composition and beautiful, bleeding color on the kind of story about sex and faith that no one has told well since before Lars Von Trier decided to tackle American imperialism with Brechtian critique.

Before the events in question, Stephanie's only tragedy is that she's sadly ordinary. A shy but precocious teen, she's young enough to still feel bound to her religious mother and internet-addict father, but just old enough to start pursuing an urgent curiosity about sex. One summer night, she follows "faster" friend Rhana (The Squid and the Whale's Halley Feiffer, again doing impeccably natural work) to a party. A friend of a friend of a friend's parents are out of town; an older brother has picked up a keg; and Stephanie has tarted herself up in eyeshadow and miniskirt, more to impress Rhana than any particular boy. Add in Stephanie's simultaneous desperate need to be touched, and near total sexual naivety, and it's not hard to imagine what's going to happen when the cute boy manning the keg cocks his head and asks her name. Sure enough, there's an empty master bedroom upstairs, and sure enough, young Cory wants to do more than kiss. Stephanie's deflowering comes to an end with a loud pounding on the door – another pair of young "lovers" want their turn – and with those ever-assuring three little words from the mouth of her suitor: "I didn't come." Nine months later, on a school ski trip, she's collapsed from blood loss in the snow; five months after that, she's pushed to Liddy's door.