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Writer/director Nikki Braendlin’s feature film debut behind the camera is a strong and thoroughly engaging character study of moods, family ties and best-kept secrets. Alternately ironic, giddy and melancholy, it has a potent trueness buoyed by its trio of able actresses.
The tale opens with Margaret, a Los Angeles party planner to the rich and famous who seems to have no concept of fun in her own life. Her postmodern house is a shrine to order and cleanliness; think Frank Lloyd Wright meets antiseptic laboratory.
She spends her non-working time listening to her nosy aunts (Dee Wallace and Jenny O’Hara) chatter away on the phone while cleaning … everything. This is a woman who wears mop-slippers on her feet so she can polish while she putters. Maggie literally wipes clean the fronds of her plants.
As played by Caroline Fogarty, Maggie is a bundle of OCD tics and carefully controlled reserve. With her short, red pixie haircut, translucent paleness and squeaky/girlie voice, she resembles a kewpie doll with serious issues. Recently dumped by her long-term boyfriend for no reason, she’s dealing with those issues by not dealing with them.
One day, her sister Josephine (Bonnie McNeil) shows up on her doorstep, unannounced, for an extended visit with her 11-year-old daughter, Hannah (Laurel Porter). Josephine is a free spirit who’s constantly on the move, never staying in once place too long and putting down roots wherever she goes. (Issues of work/income and school for Hannah are never addressed.)
Blowsy, comfortable in her own skin and slightly irresponsible, Josephine is an authentic personality, contrasted with that of Maggie, who seems carefully constructed like a suit of armor.
Their parents died when Maggie was very young, and Josephine was so much older that they never really formed a relationship. They’re essentially strangers, but it’s clear Josephine would like to set that to right. Whether the closed-off Maggie will accept the overture is another matter.
For her part, Hannah is sullen and resentful at having to stay with her no-fun aunt. She’s a fairly typical kid, whip-smart and full of possibilities; she wants to be a pop star when she grows up, or an anthropologist. But then circumstances slowly evolve, and the triangle of relationships grows more complicated.
At first, it seems like “As High as the Sky” will operate in hip, too-cool-for-school mode, with the audience invited to laugh at Maggie’s compulsive fastidiousness. But the character deepens and grows as time goes on and the silly becomes the sublimely serious. Watching this little gem of a comedy/drama is time well spent.
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