Thunder Road
Jim Cummings (2018)
Thunder Road, showing at the London Film Festival, begins with a funeral service and a eulogy delivered by the dead woman’s son. We first see Jim Arnaud, dressed in his police officer’s uniform, near the entrance to the chapel. He’s checking anxiously that a pink boombox, which doesn’t look as if it belongs to him, is in working order. Once Jim comes to the front of the chapel to speak, he faces the camera and it stays on him almost continuously for the next ten minutes. During this time, Jim rambles, dries briefly and starts crying whenever he recalls being ‘mean’ to his mother. When he turns on the boombox – to play one of her favourite songs, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’ – nothing happens. So Jim describes to the gathering the song’s lyrics and what they meant to his mother. He starts moving to the music he can hear in his head.
I knew beforehand that Thunder Road was about a man who suffers a breakdown following the death of his mother. Even allowing that this is the funeral of someone near and dear to him, the long opening sequence shows Jim emotionally out of control to an exceptional degree: here is a man having something close to a breakdown before our eyes. The impression is intensified because the camera doesn’t let us look away. We see only a little reaction from others present, shocked though they must be by what they’re witnessing. The impact of this introduction is unquestionable. You wonder how the writer-director Jim Cummings, who also plays Jim, is going to take things forward.
Jim and his wife Ros (Jocelyn DeBoer) are in the process of divorcing. Their daughter Crystal (Kendal Farr), aged ten or eleven (and the owner of the pink boombox), has been spending time with each parent since they separated but her mother is applying for sole custody – even though Ros appears to have a drugs problem. Jim demonstrates repeatedly that he has a problem of anger management. He goes ballistic while doing his job, in an interview with Crystal’s class teacher (Macon Blair), even with an unfailingly kind fellow officer (Nican Robinson) – who, with his wife (Ammie Leonards), does his best to support Jim and relieve his isolation. Neither of his siblings put in an appearance at the funeral. When Jim briefly visits his sister Morgan (Chelsea Edmundson) and asks about her relationship with their mother, Morgan’s response suggests that she has always been as miserable as Jim is now. He has lost a beloved parent, the custody battle, most of his inheritance (consumed in legal costs) and, as a result of his crazy outbursts, his job. Until the very last moments of Thunder Road, the situation seems hopeless. Jim Cummings, in short, details the unhappy context of the protagonist’s life and makes bad things happen to him but doesn’t really develop Jim as a character. Cummings, rather, elaborates a personality – needy, volatile, self-centred, short on self-awareness – that’s evident in Jim’s behaviour in the chapel.
Although it holds your attention, the story is thin and seems to have nothing new to say. I came out almost puzzled as to why the film had been made. Once I’d read a bit online about Thunder Road, things became clearer. It’s based on a twelve-minute piece of the same name, which won the Grand Jury prize for best short film at Sundance in 2016. Jim Cummings raised money through Kickstarter to develop the material into a feature. Almost needless to say, the short consists entirely of Jim’s funeral eulogy. (Cummings’s synopsis for Sundance was all of five words: ‘Officer Arnaud loved his Mom’.) The 2016 film (available on Vimeo) has three particularly striking features. First, the camera’s zoom in towards Jim seems more gradual than in the longer version: he doesn’t confront the viewer in the same way. Second, the boombox misbehaves only momentarily: the Springsteen track then plays and Jim sings and dances along to it. Third, the mixture of sad and funny in the short is confounding: in comparison, the feature film and the funeral episode within it are predominantly distressing and the occasional comic touches tend to derive from the grotesqueness of incidents.
Because Jim’s performance of ‘Thunder Road’ at the funeral in the expanded film is relatively limited, Cummings seems to think he’s keeping plenty in reserve but that’s not so – and not only because the lack of accompanying music makes Jim’s song-and-dance act in the feature much weirder than in the short. It’s understandable that Cummings doesn’t want to jettison the eulogy but, by retaining and beginning with it, he places his dramatic highlight first and renders much of what follows in this ninety-two-minute film essentially superfluous. Jim’s subsequent outbursts count for less because of what the opening ten minutes have revealed about him.
Cummings makes use of the lyrics of ‘Thunder Road’ to devise a mildly upbeat ending to the feature. The let’s-get-out-of-here thrust of the song[1] is reflected in Jim’s eventual escape from the small Texas town where the previous action has taken place. Ros has died of a drugs overdose; Jim has Crystal with him. In the final scene, they go to a theatre to watch a ballet – the art his mother loved and, for as long as she could, practised. Crystal watches with interest the dancers on the stage. Jim’s eyes fill with tears. There’s a salving quality to this moment, for sure. It comes as a relief after the load of trauma that’s gone before, though you still don’t hold out much hope for Jim Arnaud’s future.
Jim Cummings’s future could be a different matter:
‘The 30-year-old writer-director-actor who won Sundance’s short film grand jury prize in 2016 seems to have found the holy grail for up-and-coming filmmakers: steady work. A former freelance line producer for College Humor in Los Angeles, Cummings recently transitioned into writing, directing and acting full time, and now has so many projects going simultaneous[l]y that it’s hard to believe he was as an unknown filmmaker just 18 months ago. …’
This is from a piece that appeared on IndieWire even before Cummings had raised funds to make the longer Thunder Road, which has won prizes at a succession of American festivals during this year. It’s probably helped Cummings that, in the interval between the two versions of his film, America has become Trumpland. Owen Gleiberman, in his highly enthusiastic Variety review, praises the feature Thunder Road as ‘one of the first dramas to dig deep into America’s heartland crisis — the crush of the spirit that has emerged from a collapsing job market and drug addiction and the underlying loss of faith’. It’s far from clear that this is what Cummings had in mind – he seems interested in Jim Arnaud as an extraordinary individual – but it’s not surprising the film is being seen in these terms.
Cummings has written some acute dialogue and directs the cast well – especially the child who plays Crystal: Kendal Farr moves between sullen and sensitive very naturally. The closing credits begin with ‘written, directed and performed by Jim Cummings’, before moving on to the rest of the cast. That ‘performed’ is significant: it hints at both the extended sketch origins of the material and an aspect of Cummings’s acting. He creates a physically convincing figure – as Owen Gleiberman says, Jim Arnaud is ‘trim and handsome, with a conservative haircut, but he has the kind of mustache that no one wears anymore’. But I disagree with Gleiberman’s praise of Cummings’s displays of grief as deeply credible: he always looks to be pretending to be upset (to such an extent that I wondered early on if Jim Arnaud was faking distress). Cummings is at his best when Jim is relatively in control. He shows good comic timing with lines that are ironic, either in intention or in effect. Although I found Thunder Road unsatisfying and the lead’s playing patchy, I’m keen to see more from Jim Cummings – in front of or behind the camera.
11 October 2018
[1] ‘Hey, what else can we do now?/Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair/Well, the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere/We got one last chance to make it real …’