Stephanie Daley

One would think that any film addressing the issue of pregnant teenagers and abandoned newborns would be heavy handed or confessedly biased. It’s this fact that makes the enigmatic and utterly haunting Stephanie Daley doubly devastating and pure of heart. The film tells the story of the titular heroine (Amber Tamblyn) and her catastrophic pregnancy – which she claims to have known nothing about and whose offspring she insists was stillborn and did not die at her hands. The bulk of her story is told through flashbacks. In the present, we meet forensic psychologist Lydie Crane, (Tilda Swinton) a woman smart enough to ponder within minutes of her assignment to Daley’s case if her current pregnant state will compromise her assessment of the young girl. She decides that it will not affect her work and proceeds with a blasé attitude that could not be more contradictory to the true emotional connection she makes with Daley and this investigation as a whole. Her interviews with Daley five months after her baby is discovered wrapped in toilet paper in a ski lodge bathroom shape the film’s complicated structure. We pass casually back and forth between the past and present of both characters’ lives as though neither has yet to really separate one timeframe from the other. For Lydie, Daley provides a person on whom she can project her own resentments. She contests the arguments made by Daley largely as part of her struggle to come to terms with a stillbirth of her own that nearly wrecked her life less than a year ago. She fights to remain professional, but every time Daley cries innocent Lydie wrecks herself with internal anguish, as if getting the girl to express guilt will soothe her own feelings of culpability for the death of a baby which she may or may not have truly wanted in the first place.

The performances here are some of the best I have seen all year. They’re not just blanket expressions of thoughts and feelings. The words, the facial expressions, the posture, the costumes, and even the chosen hairstyles of each leading lady all work together to shape fully dimensional characters that feel incomparably authentic. Just watching Tamblyn’s soft eyes and dejected body language, you can glean a world of insight into the mind of her lost soul teen girl persona. Her character feels as specific and precise as could be, and yet she is such an everygirl that it’s absolutely horrifying. She’s dealing with unimaginable complexities yet no one notices her struggle – in this case a literally visible pregnancy that no one bothers to look at, but elsewhere just generally the way in which her simple middle America life does not begin to help her deal with the real world. In the most upsetting of the movie’s flashbacks, Tamblyn performs an extensive sequence that visualizes Stephanie giving birth. As she cries silently behind the locked doors of the bathroom stall, gaggles of gossiping school girls stroll in and out laughing and teasing one another, chomping on bubblegum as one of their own goes unnoticed, using her to teeth to chew through the umbilical chord linking her to the dead infant (according to her claim) she’s just brought into the world, effectively severing all of her ties with the child and her own already fragile sense of innocence. When we see her in her younger years, before the ski lodge incident, she’s like a completely different girl. She’s shy and silly. In her current state she’s dejected, jaded, and utterly vacant. Naiveté can only be afforded for so long before, as Lydie puts it, it becomes an active decision to choose denial. Such a statement rings true to her life as well. She’s living a complacent life in a troubled marriage and clinging to the hope that this baby will be different, but feeling endlessly as though she’s lost her chance at hope and new life.

The two women bond solemnly over the confounding pressure and self-defeat their seemingly comfortable lives have caused them. It’s as if neither one has the nerve to deliver another person into the world that has left them so sick with pity and grief. The true nature of each character’s intentions remains an obscure abstraction by film’s end, though. We never really get a concrete grasp on what Lydie sees in Daley that rattles her so deeply or what she truly feels for the child she’s carrying or felt for the baby of her past. There’s not such a solid structure or point here. Mostly, the movie just floats through a world of perfectly poignant dismay until the wheels stop spinning and both women just agree to stumble back into the numbing daily grind of life for as long as they can persist.

Grade: A-