Sony Pictures Classics: Manny & Lo (1996) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Decades before Scarlett Johansson became one of America’s most prominent actresses and sex symbols in Hollywood, only four films into her career only at the age of twelve she took on Committed writer-director and Benny & Joon script supervisor Lisa Krueger’s feature film debut with the scrappy female led road movie Manny & Lo.  Produced by (and briefly starring) Dean Silver of David O. Russell’s Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster and released through Sony Pictures Classics, the film easily joins the likes of Allison Anders’ coming-of-age drama Gas Food Lodging for its distinctly midwestern female perspective and cumulative experience.  While Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise for many is the first obvious go to of the feminine road drama for many, there are quite a number of smaller yet no less honest and forthright character driven quasi-New Hollywood dramas by, for and about women equally deserving of critical and/or commercial attention. 

 
Young preteen sisters consisting of eleven-year-old Amanda (Scarlett Johansson) nicknamed Manny and her fifteen-year-old sister Laurel (Aleksa Palladino in her screen debut) are runaways on the road escaping several foster homes following the death of their mother.  Shacking up as stowaways wherever they’re able including in model homes, the lone twosome soon discover Lo is pregnant.  Clearly now unable to manage on their own, Lo drags Amanda into the hasty kidnapping of a baby store clerk named Elaine (Mary Kay Place) thinking she’ll be able to help out somehow.  As time goes on however, it becomes apparent their kidnapping victim may need them even more than they need her with ample room for a most unlikely bond that finds maternal instincts conjuring up and being passed on to a new younger generation ready or not.

 
A modestly sized pairing of young child actress with an older actor ala Mackintosh and T.J. or Zelly and Me which finds room for character development and growth by approaching real world human problems from an innocent inexperienced perspective, Manny & Lo is probably best remembered for sporting a very young Scarlett Johansson in her first leading role.  With its moody low key score by Fishing with John star John Lurie and scenic road landscapes cinematography by eventual music video camerawork regular Tom Krueger, the microbudget (made around $500,000) effort comes across as warm and inviting with the world of the film as Manny & Lo’s oyster.  Special attention goes to Aleksa Palladino in her screen debut as Lo who has a kind of proto-Greta Gerwig energy about herself and The Big Chill actress and country singer Mary Kay Place as the kidnapped turned doting maternal pillar imbues the film concerning these two wandering lost souls with maturity and focus. 

 
While a critical darling, sadly Manny & Lo just barely turned a profit and more or less went unseen for decades as a cult curiosity.  Despite this, director Lisa Krueger went on to make Committed with Heather Graham four years later and naturally Scarlett Johansson as she matured into adulthood became a major Hollywood player and film director herself.  An unsentimental real-world tale of three women who might have more in common and in need than they initially realize, part of the film’s charm is its unpredictability and the road-movie structure of taking refuge wherever they can adds to the authenticity of the piece.  A paean to orphaned children struggling to find place and meaning in the world and a testament to the feminine power of love and maternalism however dysfunctional the circumstances maybe, Manny & Lo is a clandestine little gem which won’t reinvent the wheel but will give you some perspective on carrying on with a life of abandonment and finding hope and reason amid difficult circumstances.  It has a habit of growing on you by the time it is near over with.

--Andrew Kotwicki