So many problems, so many misguided directions.
“Echo Valley” is a made-for-AppleTV+ movie with a mother and daughter relationship having different problems. One of them regards love and loss, and the other regards bad choices, which accumulates into more problems. And the movie itself doesn’t have a good sense of direction. It suggests that it wants to help both the mother and daughter with their problems, but it ends up going all over the place.
Julianne Moore plays Kate Garrett, a horse trainer with a Pennsylvania farm, who is going through a personal tragedy with plenty of support from her kindly neighbor Leslie (Fiona Shaw). In addition, her junkie daughter Claire (Sydney Sweeney) throws out her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend Ryan’s (Edmund Donovan) stuff, and one of the things she threw out are drugs that belong to the sadistic dealer Jackie Lyman (Domhnall Gleeson).
At first, Kate refuses to help her daughter, based on her poor choices such as skipping out on her rehab sessions. Claire says she needs the money for food and supplies for camping, but the mother knows that’s a load of bull. But one night, the daughter comes home with Ryan’s blood, ands tells her mother that out of anger, she accidentally kills him. And that’s when she must help her daughter. But of course, not everything is what it seems, and that starts to agitate Jackie a bit, up to the point of him threatening Kate.
The daughter basically ends up leaving the story early and pouring her problems on her mother, and that’s when the film tries to go all John Grisham and Steven Soderbergh on Kate. There are threats, dangers, and twists and turns along the way. Some bad, some good, and all annoying and flat.
The element that makes the film believable is the performance from Moore. She displays the right range of emotions, reflecting on a woman who lost something or someone, and a mother who contemplates helping her daughter deal with her addiction. And you can tell she’s one of our finest actresses, especially with her blue eyes and facial expressions helping to represent her acting abilities. But so far in the 2020s, she’s presented fine performances in better films like “May December” and “The Room Next Door.” It’s not enough for me to recommend “Echo Valley.”
Gleeson is not having a hot year so far with “Fountain of Youth” and “Echo Valley.” They both may be hits on AppleTV+, but he overdoes the villains, and they’re more annoying than conniving. Maybe they’re both conniving, but I’m still annoyed by them. In this movie, his character is inferior to his on the Hulu miniseries “The Patient,” because he’s seems to be mean-spirted without any essence.
And the weakest belongs to Sweeney, who distresses you with how she represents her junkie character. And it’s difficult to tell if she gets her pay-off or not. She can be a good actress, since she was the only good thing about the overrated “Immaculate,” but she acts all bratty here, which is more annoying than the Gleeson character. I’m sorry to be dumping on a young actress like her, but she needs better material than what she’s been given lately (with “Madame Web” being the worst).
I was thinking back to “For Good Days,” which was a flawed, but affective drama about a mother helping her junkie daughter get cleaned. She had to go a few days without taking drugs in order to take a shot that could help get rid of her addiction. That wasn’t a perfect movie, but it was still well-acted by the likes of Glenn Close and Mila Kunis. Anything is better than what Brad Ingelsby’s (“The Way Back,” “Out of the Furnace”) screenplay can conjure up in “Echo Valley.” Moore is probably the reason to see this movie and she does what she can, but it’s just too meandering and exhausting to be emotionally entertaining.
Now Streaming on AppleTV+
