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This well-acted but occasionally self-important drama looks at the relationship between two Korean-American sisters and the mentally unstable drug addict they had for a mother.
It's produced by the real-life Lobit sisters, Alyssa and Athena, and Alyssa wrote the script and stars as Emeline Roberts, the wayward daughter who must reconcile the shards her mother's erratic behavior drove deep into her own soul.
While traveling the world, Emmie gets a terse note from her sister Eve (Catherine Kresge) that their mother has died, which she doesn't receive until after the funeral. Catching the next flight home, Emmie eschews her family's tidy Van Euys bungalow for the skid-row Best Motel, where her mother often stayed during her long bouts with crack cocaine.
It's a denizen of prostitutes, thieves and junkies. Kim (Ilene Graff) is the resident old kook who befriended their mother, Sunny Roberts (Alexis Rhee), during her saner moments. There's also Jeremiah, a helpful fellow junkie -- an excellent Johnny Whitworth, whose eyes peer like open wounds.
I also appreciated Daniel Zacapa's all-too-brief appearance as Leslie, a local queen turned den mother to the city's various riffraff.
Emmie learns that the mysterious Ricky has a package for her from her mother, and she and Eve spend the next few days cruising through Los Angeles' seedier neighborhoods trying to track him down.
The real journey, though, is in reconciling the sisters with each other and their mother's memory. Eve is the good sister who stayed at home to take care of Sunny, and the resentment she holds for the freewheeling life Emmie has chosen is palpable.
The best scenes are those between Kresge and Lobit. The sibling dynamics of love leavened with antipathy have a solid, substantive feel to them. Their interactions are complex and genuine.
Less successful are frequent flashbacks to the girls' earlier lives dealing with their mother. Interspersed throughout the story haphazardly -- only a change in Emmie's hairstyle cues us in that we've slipped backward in time -- these scenes tend to cluster into vignettes of Sunny's extreme behavior that repeat themselves. It's almost as if director Ian McCrudden felt he could get his point across better with quantity rather than quality.
"The Things We Carry" is a serious film that sometimes takes itself a bit too seriously.
3 Yaps