Premiering at Sundance 2024 yet assembled as if it were primed for the festival two or three decades earlier, Suncoast is the kind of broad, sunny Searchlight crowd-pleaser that aims to make up for its lack of originality with an abundance of heavily shoveled charm. It’s a strategy that just about works when the stakes are low and soapy but films in this subgenre ultimately demand a full-on assault to the heartstrings and the first-time writer-director Laura Chinn can’t quite muster enough genuine emotion to get us there, her so-so debut working best when investment is at its lowest.
It’s a busy patchwork of dynamics we loosely know from Searchlight indies all too well. There’s the coming-of-age narrative of a girl named Doris (played by Thandiwe Newton’s daughter Nico Parker) who is pushing herself out of the shadows at school to become more seen, making friends with the girls who had previously ignored her and flirting with the guy she’d never thought herself good enough for. There’s the family drama that sees her clash with a difficult mother (played by Laura Linney) who spends her time caring for a non-communicative son dying of cancer, letting their relationship suffer in the process. Then there’s the most superfluous element as Doris strikes an unlikely friendship with an eccentric grieving husband (Woody Harrelson) protesting outside the hospice where her brother is being cared for.
Loosely based on Chinn’s experiences as a teen growing up in the mid-00s, Suncoast feels influenced less by what it was really like in 2005 and more by the kinds of earnestly made dramedies that were being released at the time. Linney is incapable of a truly bad performance and watching her do her brittle, one rant away from having a heart attack shtick is forever watchable but it’s hard to fully buy her as a working-class Floridian waiting tables, never not seeming like she’s a lost Upper East Sider. Parker is a charming young actor but she’s similarly too refined to sell girl from the wrong side of the tracks who no one has noticed at school. The pair do a decent amount of lifting, Linney especially, but we’re never immersed enough in their world to believe them as anything but actors doing a bit, adding another level of artifice to something that is in need of more reality. Harrelson is in full sleepwalk mode, grouching and quipping like he could be in any one of his films from the last 20 years, and it’s not really his fault, his very inclusion never making any narrative sense other than to help pad out a slight story with a sellable name.
None of the threads are able to poke themselves out of the murk of familiarity enough to truly pierce (the high school drama is too unspecific to do anything but amble along) but it’s the mother-daughter conflict that almost gets there. Linney’s struggle – knowing your child is slowly dying and being unable to let that thought not utterly consume and destroy you – is often played a little too cartoonishly but it’s also affecting and difficult in moments, as the long march of pre-grief transforms a person into someone who can be unpleasant to be around. It’s this knottier character that ends up feeling the most authentic in a film that can struggle with authenticity.
Never quite landing with enough of an impact for it to stick around in our heads after the sun has gone in, Suncoast settles for amiable competency.
Suncoast is available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK on 9 February
