Sundance 2022 | Review: "Palm Trees and Power Lines" and the Strange Course of Escape
10/12 ForReel Score | 4/5 Stars
In cartoonist Simon Hanselmann’s graphic novel, Bad Gateway, a chapter entitled “Throwing Rocks at Power Lines” offers a rare glimpse into the awkward teenage years of degenerate monsters, Megg, Mogg, and Owl. Centreing primarily on Megg, a witch, the chapter tells a story of teenage ennui that prefaces the struggles with addiction, depression, and disillusionment that will come later in the series’ timeline. While Megg deals with harassment by D.E.A. officers and her single mother’s attempts to connect with her, her friends smoke, drink, and toss rocks at some over-hanging power lines to kill the time.
Palm Trees and Power Lines, a new film detailing the story of a 17-year-old girl’s relationship with a 34-year-old man, treads similar ground. Like Megg, Lily McInerny’s Lea grapples with the transitory period that is one’s late teens. She yearns to be treated like an adult and partake in adult activities, yet wants nothing to do with adults like her mother. Most importantly, she seems to be looking for an escape—an escape from banality, from self-doubt, from reality. This, maybe, is where the symbol of the power lines finds its resonance. What are power lines but connections to some place else, some promise of escape, threading and weaving themselves through clear skies and clouded minds.
Palm Trees and Power Lines arrives at Sundance 2022 in an era rife with films about adolescent girls and their attempts to grab hold of any possible line as a way out—think Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank or Jasmin Mozaffari’s Firecrackers—and it continues to stir the pot on the age gap discourse opened up by recent films like Licorice Pizza and Red Rocket. Parallels like these are easy to draw, but should not be used as easy points against new entrants.
Palm Trees feels unique in how it assembles its familiar story with such sparing elements, and in how it dials back stylistic flourishes. It is not a film that makes use of a neon-drenched or pastel-flushed colour palette; it is not a film about a particularly volatile teenager. Palm Trees instead uses unflashy cinematography, a deliberate pace, and naturalistic performances, its primary one coming from a subtly brilliant, appropriately restrained McInerny. As the lanky and terminally unenthused Lea, McInerny assumes the role of the almost-invisible everygirl in America, the one wading in the shallow, tepid waters of suburbia, often housing a sordid story the world would prefer to ignore. Director Jamie Dack, adapting her own short into this feature debut and obviously working from a place in which she feels personally connected, keeps every scene focused solely on her protagonist, grounding her narrative in the precocious logic of the still-malleable teenage mind. Palm Trees is a refreshingly focused character study in that it doesn’t let itself get diverted by needless B-plots and side characters.
But then, there is the crew cut-sporting, cargo shorts-wearing, Ford truck-driving 34-year-old Tom. Jonathan Tucker as Tom is a chilling presence, looking and operating like Robert Patrick’s T-1000, rooting himself as an unshakeable presence in Lea’s life with rigorous efficiency. He looks to the power lines that Lea looks to and sees her yearning for escape, becoming a distressing, predatory amalgamation of both romantic partner and father figure, beckoning Lea away from her tenuous ties to reality. The way he casually delivers commands to Lea, and scorns her as the film progresses, is enough to make you squirm. Dack expertly controls her story, making you cling desperately to your hope that the story won’t go where you fear it will.
Though Palm Trees can be a deeply uncomfortable viewing experience overall, this feels necessary when the aim is to align audiences with the protagonist as her world takes on darker tones. If your instincts should become enflamed inside you while you are watching, Dack and her cast assure you that they have told their story right. As Tucker assured audiences during the film’s post-premier Q&A, Palm Trees is a cautionary tale, one that hopefully urges viewers to trust their guts over the flimsy logic sometimes concocted by their brains. Power lines, after all, can shock—so, maybe you’re better off throwing rocks at them.