Written and directed by Alexandre Rockwell
Starring Lana Rockwell, Nico Rockwell, Will Patton, Jabari Watkins, Karyn Parsons
Runtime: 1 hour 31 minutes
Unrated
Available DVD and Digital on 10/12

by Audrey Callerstrom, Associate Editor and Staff Writer

Alexandre Rockwell, writer/director of Sweet Thing, had a brief stint of popularity during the independent film boom of the 1990s. He wrote and directed In The Soup starring Steve Buscemi, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1992. He followed up that film with Somebody to Love, also featuring Buscemi, and he directed a segment in Four Rooms. And then, relative silence. He would collaborate with Buscemi on some smaller films in the early 2000s, none of which found an audience.

In Sweet Thing, Rockwell casts his wife, actress Karyn Parsons (Hilary from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), and their two children, Nico and Lana Rockwell, for a sweet indie about children who run away from home. It has a unique aesthetic, transitioning between black and white and color, using vignettes to signal the close of a scene. Lana and Nico play siblings Billie and Nico who live with their alcoholic father, played by underrated character actor Will Patton. Their father drinks in between quirky gigs such as a bus stop Santa or a sign spinner in a panda suit. These scenes lend themself a little bit to a form of quirky poverty, one that feels a bit too far removed from reality in a way that could be problematic. I don’t dispute that there are alcoholic sign spinners wearing panda suits out there, in the world. Maybe there are. But it feels a little false, especially when their father removes the giant panda head to take another swig. The juxtaposition of a spiraling alcoholic in a panda suit is a bit too obvious.

The siblings are transferred to their mother (Karyn Parsons), whose abusive boyfriend, Beaux (M.L. Josepher) causes the siblings to go off on their own, breaking into houses in rich neighborhoods and playing grown up. The film kind of loses its way when the siblings, along with a neighbor boy, Malik (Jabari Watkins) embark on a road trip. It abandons the color/black and white transitioning at this point in the story, as well as the vignettes it used to transition between scenes. Earlier scenes show that Billie imagines Billie Holiday at her side (she was named after the singer). It’s not clear what purpose this serves. What does Billie Holiday mean to Billie, if anything? We’ve seen films like this before, of traumatic childhoods played with a sense of adventure and whimsy. For example, The Florida Project, which is and was magnificent, as well as Beasts of the Southern Wild. Aside from some of its unique stylistic choices and close-up shots, there’s nothing here that distinguishes Sweet Thing from other films of this genre. It all feels a little slight, like it wants to hide from darker themes and live in a black and white surreal dream world.

The film could have benefitted from some more scenes between Patton and Parsons, as Billie and Nico’s parents. We only see one scene of their dad trying to stake out their mom for a date in an effort to win her back. It further lends the film toward the dreamy/whimsical childhood perspective, to its detriment. It needs to be more mature. Billie is 15, and appears to keep her thoughts about her parents to herself. But, she’s also the film’s lead, and she’s in nearly every scene, so it would be more engaging if she were a more fully fleshed out human being. People comment on her singing voice, and her kinky hair, and that’s about what we see and know. Sweet Thing looks great, and sounds great, too; additional crowdsourcing was done to secure certain music rights (like, I assume, Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)”). Sweet Thing is clearly a labor of love, giving Alexandre Rockwell the opportunity to create a film with his family, but the characters feel underdone.