Toronto film festival: A soldier with a serious brain injury takes a jarringly smooth and photogenic road back to health in this glib tale
Some perfectly good, sincerely intended performances and well-meant ideas don’t do quite enough to correct the glibness and triteness in this self-conscious drama set in New Orleans. Jennifer Lawrence plays Lindsay, a serving soldier in the US military who has been sent home from Afghanistan, suffering from a traumatic brain injury after the explosion of two roadside bombs . Lindsay now has anxiety, disorientation, memory loss and physical coordination issues.
After therapy from a kindly nurse, Sharon (Jayne Houdyshell), Lindsay has to live with her mom, Gloria (Linda Emond), who is a bit of a drinker and perhaps not providing the exact environment she needs. To the astonished dismay of her physician and family, Lindsay is keen not merely to get better, but to get better enough to redeploy, to go back into the army and see action once again in Afghanistan. She associates New Orleans with a grim world that might drag her down the way it dragged down her drug-abusing brother; the army got her out of there and she is ready to risk everything once again on the field of battle. At least now she has a friend: the sweet-natured, worldly-wise guy who fixed her truck, James, played by Brian Tyree Henry. Like Lawrence, he delivers a decent performance.
