After her recent high-profile campaign for New York governor — not to mention untold episodes of “Sex and the City” — Cynthia Nixon struggles to convince as an Eastern European motelier and possible human trafficker. Playing the shady Una in “Stray Dolls,” a small-scale crime thriller, she delivers both performance and accent without fault. Even so, her casting is a problematic distraction, both from the movie’s far less recognizable stars and from a story that’s flimsy to begin with.
“I got a big heart,” Una tells her latest acquisition, Riz (Geetanjali Thapa), an undocumented Indian immigrant who has arrived in upstate New York hoping for a better life. Promised a room and a cleaning job, Riz crashes into reality immediately when she meets her roommate, Dallas (Olivia DeJonge), a grasping runaway who steals Riz’s meager belongings at knife-point. They will be returned when Riz has carried out Dallas’s instructions to steal from the motel’s guests, a crime that Riz is adamantly unwilling to commit. Given that we have already seen Una surreptitiously shred Riz’s passport, it’s clear that the newcomer’s reluctance will be short-lived.
So begins a depressingly familiar downward spiral as the young women’s fiercely-held dreams of advancement are derailed by fate and their own weaknesses. Pills are popped and imprudent liaisons conducted — most notably with Una’s shiftless son, Jimmy (Robert Aramayo) — as the fallout from a stolen brick of cocaine causes escalating peril. With no plan beyond the next disastrous move, the women are simply reacting to fairly predictable events that the script (by the director, Sonejuhi Sinha, and Charlotte Rabate) fails to weave into an original message.
As Riz and Dallas inch from foes to friends (and maybe more), the movie’s vision is too narrow to exploit the obvious gifts of its stars. DeJonge, who strongly resembles the young Kirsten Dunst, has a feisty energy that doesn’t overwhelm the vulnerability beneath Dallas’s brashness. It’s Thapa, though, with her too-wise eyes and steely composure, who gives the movie substance: Initially appearing a helpless victim, Riz gradually reveals a fearlessness and facility with violence that suggest a darker past than she or the writers acknowledge. And when she seals herself in a phone booth to call her anxious family back home, her brightly animated lies transform her shocking behavior into a simple story of immigrant yearning.
Despite its sense of dead-end desperation, “Stray Dolls” is made worthwhile by the richness of Shane Sigler’s nighttime cinematography and the consistent empathy of its tone. Sinha, herself a first-generation immigrant, isn’t about to judge anyone for reaching.
Stray Dolls
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
