The Weight

Ignatz nominee Mendes (Freddy Stories) delivers a gut punch of a family saga that finds moments of hardscrabble transcendence in the Depression-era dairy fields of America’s Northeast. The Catheresque story follows headstrong Edie from a tomboyish childhood on the outskirts of a U.S. Air Force base, where she lives with her parents in a shack insulated with newspaper, to her adolescence on her grandparents’ modest farm, where she wanders fields of clover and encounters turtles, grasshoppers, and herons. Edie’s visceral compassion for animals is a defining trait. In one early scene, she performs burial rites for a rabbit over the protests of the neighborhood boys who trapped it. Such cruelties are all too familiar to Edie, a regular witness to her father’s brutal drunken tirades against her mother. Edie’s laconic but devoted grandparents—and the Arcadian routines of the farm itself—offer refuge from deep-seated traumas, but alcoholism, chauvinism, and abuse persist beyond the fence line, testing Edie’s grit and resolve. Mendes imbues her homespun cartooning with an attentiveness that at times evokes Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl photographs, while ink washes add weather-worn depth and, quite often, the foreboding charge of a gathering storm. Unsentimental and quietly devastating, this portrait of resilience is a feat of rough eloquence that leaves an indelible impression. (Sept.)