SUNLIGHT – Review by Nell Minow
The excellent documentary Dumbstruck shows us that many, if not most ventriloquists feel that they can make more unfiltered, even outrageous comments as their puppets than they can as themselves. We can think of narrative filmmaking as a kind of ventriloquism, with the actors who may look and sound very different expressing the words and emotions imagined by the writer and director.
Sunlight is directed by Nina Conti, a real-life British comedian and ventriloquist who made a documentary in 2012 about inheriting her mentor’s puppets, documents, and equipment, and attending the Vent Haven International Ventriloquist Convention in Kentucky. In her first narrative feature, Conti also stars as a sort of ventriloquist, appearing almost entirely dressed as a monkey, with a distinctly different – and more unfiltered and outrageous – voice than the one we finally hear as “herself.” The monkey character, just called Monkey, closely resembles the puppet in Conti’s stage performances.
Screenwriter Shenoah Allen plays Roy, a radio journalist who specializes in cheerful “special interest” interviews, with a talent for sounding like he is excited by even the most mundane subject. “I just have a cheery voice,” he explains, and Monkey, who has a British accent, tells him what he is good at is “wittering” (rambling chitchat about nothing important).
As the movie opens, though, Roy has checked into a cheap motel and is preparing to commit suicide. He does not succeed and he is so surprised to find himself awake that he barely has the bandwidth to be surprised at waking up a passenger in his own van, driven by a person in a monkey outfit, the kind you might see as a sports mascot doing cartwheels during half time. They end up agreeing to go on a trip together. Monkey wants to get to a lake in Colorado. Roy agrees, but first he wants to stop by his mother’s house to retrieve his suicide note before she sees it (he’s too late) and then to dig up his father’s grave to express some strong feelings.
Both characters are so beat down and so vulnerable that they have no defenses, no pretentions, nothing left but simple, direct, unvarnished honesty. That creates an immediate connection that is funny and endearing. They are both focused on very specific goals that someone who had not reached rock bottom might find unrealistic or meaningless. But they both feel so out of other options that they instantly commit to each other’s plans.
Monkey wants to buy a pontoon and sell rides on the lake. Roy says that when he digs up his dead father, he will retrieve a very expensive watch and give Monkey half the money to buy the pontoon.
Monkey speaks of the person inside the suit in the third person. She is Jane, whose stepfather Wade (Bill Wise) is good at filling out forms. He keeps a “checklist of things that make me mentally unfit” and he is trying to get her (and the monkey suit) back so he can control her. The monkey disguise is protective, to keep people from seeing a Jane Monkey fears is broken and unworthy. She says it keeps Jane from making bad decisions. As the journey continues, Monkey is afraid Roy will not like the person inside as much as he likes the Monkey he knows.
“You’re kind of inviting in a weird way,” Roy says, as their intimacy grows. Their exchanges have an easy, improvisational naturalness. His spacious acceptance and then unquestioning support for Monkey is very touching for Monkey and Jane and for us as we feel we are on the journey with them. He never asks to see the person inside but kindly offers to wash the monkey suit, promising not to try to see the person inside. While he goes to the laundromat, Jane takes a shower and looks at herself in the mirror. It is very moving to see her beginning to be willing to see herself and to be seen. “Sunlight,” the name of Roy’s radio station, appears on the side of the van. But it is also the light and warmth that helps two damaged people find acceptance and comfort in this tenderly told story.
