TAKE ME HOME – Review by Sarah Ward
Getting by. Making do. While Take Me Home doesn’t task anyone within its frames with uttering these exact phrases, they still echo loudly for Anna (Anna Sargent), her parents Joan (Marceline Hugot, The Gilded Age) and Bob (Victor Slezak, The Order), and, when she’s back home in Orlando from New York, her sister Emily (Ali Ahn, The Diplomat). It should surprise no one that navigating the American healthcare system as a person with a cognitive disability, or as their carer — as anyone aging, or simply hoping that any medical or assistance needs could and would be met appropriately, too — is often a matter of trying to find a way to somehow cope but wishing for far, far better. Indeed, writer/director Liz Sargent puts that reality in clear focus. Her debut feature, building upon her 2023 short of the same name, can’t be accused of merely managing, however — not when it demonstrates such an evident commitment to intimately, sincerely, authentically and intricately seeing its characters and their circumstances.
Liz Sargent isn’t telling an autobiographical tale, but she’s borrowing details —enlisting her own sister with a cognitive disability as her lead, for instance, and mirroring the fact that they’re both Korean American, adopted by white parents, in the movie’s siblings. Although a film doesn’t need to possess even that level of truth to prove emotionally resonant (see, at the blockbuster end of the scale, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, this year’s box office-topper to-date), Take Me Home feels honest and lived-in at every moment. Its The Florida Project-esque ending might be ambitious, but the sudden and significant shift of style and tone is just as fuelled by deeply understanding the vast difference between the world that should exist and the one that does.
For most of its running time, Take Me Home conveys another version of that utopia-versus-actuality contrast. With its leisurely pace, as well as its eagerness to soak in the minutiae of Anna and company’s lives — joys, struggles and all — it offers the patience and care so rarely afforded Sargent’s characters by anyone else. As lensed with unvarnished clarity by cinematographer Farhad Ahmed Dehlvi (Singing in My Sleep), this is a movie that starts with 38-year-old Anna singing happily along to a song, via her headphones, only she can hear; it’s also a film that appreciates how pretending you’re on holiday can temporarily brighten your day. It gives the everyday stresses and stumbles as much time, whether Anna is keeping the entire house awake, and sometimes putting herself in danger, while searching for her water bottle, or her beloved popsicles don’t fit the budget on a trip to the grocery store.
Take Me Home’s most revealing and impactful scenes swing between emotions, among the complex layers of the family’s dynamic or both. The tenderness of Joan bathing Anna, then needing her daughter’s aid to arise and stand, is one early example. A furious reaction to again being denied popsicles, followed by an act of rebellion and moment of stolen bliss, provides another. Many more surround them. Through that kind of fine-tuned observation, it quickly becomes plain, to the audience at least, that caregiving is mutual between Anna and her mom and dad. Until a heatwave tragedy necessitates her return after a prolonged absence (complete with many dodged phone and video calls during that period), Emily isn’t as aware of how much the years have been catching up with her parents physically and mentally. When she asks what will come next, and what help is and should be available, after the family’s status quo is drastically altered, so does the movie — pointedly so.
Anna Sargent’s acting resume might currently span just Take Me Home twice over, but she’s a key reason that both films are award-winners (the short picked up the Grand Jury Prize at the American Cinematheque Proof of Concept Film Festival, the feature took home Sundance’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award). As her director-slash-sister is well-aware, including by giving her room to improvise, she’s a magnetic and vibrant performer — and, even when their interactions involve shouting or hurtful words, or anger or distress, she’s engagingly and openly complemented by Hugot, Slezak and Ahn. All three deliver turns similarly painted with the naturalism that both Sargents, filmmaker and star, demand; the many shades of heartbreak and uncertainty that linger in the trio’s respective eyes alone speak volumes. Playing a neighbor who becomes a friend, Shane Harper (Power Book IV: Force) also imparts warmth and thoughtfulness as he expands Anna’s otherwise family-centric social circle over beers and basketball.
When Anna initially begins chatting with Harper’s James, she’s fleeing home out of the frustration that keeps festering when her routine is irreparably shattered; he’s drinking on his driveway with friends. The contents of the bottle that’s swiftly in her hand don’t go down well, but when she’s asked to join in on a prank, she’s almost instantly skilled at balancing an empty can on a passed-out guy’s head. There’s a comparable sense of precariousness to Take Me Home itself, not only within the events of its narrative — a feeling for viewers that at any second, the movie could be tempted to make too obvious a move, stress too one-note a point, let cliches seep in or opt for convenience, and therefore fall down. In lesser hands, that’s likely what would happen. Not once, though, does Liz Sargent allow her labor-of-love exploration of living with disability to teeter or just scrape through.
