‘Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)’ Review: Charming Slice-of-Life Drama Makes for a Low-Key but Refreshing Mental Vacation
The opening moments of Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) are pictures of idyll. Ducks bob in a row across the water. A basketball hoop stands surrounded by trees, waiting for someone to come out and play. A girl swings lazily in a hammock. Especially at a time when it so often feels like the world is burning down (maybe literally, depending on where you are), the scenes feel like a much-needed break.
But if Sunfish is a vacation, it’s the kind that’s less about escaping into a fantasy than about trying on a different reality: learning your way around the terrain, getting to know the locals, falling into their everyday rhythms. Once it’s over, you’ll resume your normal life to find not much has changed. For those 87 minutes, though, it’s just nice to get to drop in on its world.
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Overly precious punctuation notwithstanding, Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) finds its appeal in its modesty. Premiering in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance, it takes what one could reasonably describe as a typically Sundance-ian approach to storytelling, unspooling in four loosely interconnected slice-of-life vignettes. But it gets an extra boost of charm from writer-director Sierra Falconer’s familiarity with the setting. Having grown up around the real Green Lake, in Michigan, she regards the environs with affection, easy intimacy and a touch of nostalgia, but also a refreshing sense of clarity.
Each of its component chapters finds its protagonists at a defining moment in their life, though most of those are subtle and internal coming-of-age epiphanies of the sort that might mean everything to the people experiencing them but look like nothing at all to a random onlooker.
In the opening chapter, 14-year-old Lu (Maren Heary) spends the summer with her grandparents, learning to sail and birdwatch and heal from her tumultuous relationship with her flighty mother, Jen (Lauren Sweetser). Next door, a pair of inseparable sisters say goodbye as the eldest, Robin (Emily Hall) prepares to leave for culinary school, leaving younger Blue (Tenley Kellogg) to keep the family bed and breakfast running. Across the lake, a violin prodigy, Jun (Jim Kaplan), competes for first chair of the Interlochen Arts Camp orchestra, trying not to crumple under the pressure.
The only real deviation from this pleasantly mellow formula comes in the third chapter, “Two-Hearted.” A dying fisherman, cutely named Finn (Dominic Bogart), resolves to catch a fish almost too big to be believed, hoping it might be his legacy. Once bartender and single mother Annie (Karsen Liotta) steps in to help, the quest turns into a small-scale version of an outlaw romance — not the kind of thing that’ll make national news, maybe, but one that could immediately become enshrined as local legend.
“Two-Hearted” serves as a necessary counterpoint to the rest of Sunfish, breaking up what could otherwise have become a monotonous procession of minor young-adult heartbreaks — but in doing so, also throws into sharp relief just how similar some of the other plots are. Then again, it’s a testament to Falconer’s sure hand that I found myself wishing not for less time spent with Green Lake’s various teens, but simply more time spent with its locals and lifers, in parts of town less picturesque than the lakefront cabins where Lu and Blue and Jun suffer their adolescent dramas.
Across all four parts, Falconer is economical with her exposition. She trusts that the snapshots we get of her characters’ lives will be enough, and they are. No exposition-dump backstory is necessary when a detail as minor as the way Blue gets out of a hammock — crawling all over Robin, rather than rolling out her own side — speaks volumes about the girl’s desire to cling to the sister who’s pulling away. Her light touch as a storyteller makes it easy to forgive her occasionally heavy hand with metaphors, as when Lu starts to project her own familial dysfunction on a duckling seemingly abandoned by its mother.
At the same time, she’s unafraid to leave her characters in ambiguous places, or unresolved feelings. Jun spends his summer torn between the anguished perfectionism of his solo practice sessions and the longing he directs toward his more carefree peers — particularly his stiffest competition Enzo (Giovanni Mazza), a handsome and popular boy who seems to be everything Jun isn’t. But while we do eventually find out which kid makes first chair, Falconer leaves Jun looking more overwhelmed than either devastated or exhilarated. You get the sense he’s only at the start of what’s going to be a complicated journey of sorting out his desires from the ones that were imposed upon him.
All of these fluid endings and beginnings — each chapter transitions into the next almost as if by accident, with one main character casually crossing in the path of the next — leave us with the sense that we’re just popping in for a few days at a time. Even Finn and Annie’s thrilling escapade feels like something we’re lucky to have stumbled upon on some sunny afternoon, rather than the whole reason we’ve been brought to this town.
Notably, though Sunfish never specifies a time period, it’s one conspicuously absent of cell phones. When Lu tries to reach her absent mother, it’s on a landline; when Finn and Annie need a harpoon gun, they look not to Amazon but to a local shop. Without making a grand statement of it, the film builds a case for putting down the screens in our hands and taking in the world around us, in all its tiny surprises and modest beauties.
By the time Robin drives off at the end, following a tearful hug with Blue, we feel much as she does: sorry to leave this place, but grateful to have had the privilege of knowing it.
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