After All: Three Generations of Women Learn to Forgive in Family Drama
By Liz Braun
Rating: B
After All is a coming-of-age story for just about everyone involved — three generations of women, young and old. These are hardscrabble lives marked by tragedy, mental illness, comparative poverty and simple bad luck.
Being together and caring for one another proves to be therapeutic for the members of this family. Sometimes the ties that bind work like a tourniquet.
Erika Christensen stars as Ellen, a lost soul who drinks beer for breakfast and is barely scraping by. She appears to live in a motel, holds down a lousy job, and lives an anger-fuelled life.
Ellen has a teenage daughter, Haley (Kiara Muhammad). The child is being raised by Ellen’s mother, Verna (Penelope Ann Miller). Verna and Haley live in the family home in a rural area of Texas, where Haley is bullied at school for all the usual adolescent reasons as well as for having an absent mother and being raised by her grandmother.
When Verna is hospitalized, Ellen gets called back to her little hometown. Turns out Verna has had a stroke. She’s going to need round-the-clock care. Ellen has no intention of signing on for anything like that, but she decides to stick around for a while.
Just being in her childhood home drives Ellen to drink. Between flashbacks to the past and her father’s violence, and conversations with her mostly estranged daughter Haley, Ellen slowly reveals the nightmare that was her upbringing.
“My life was a living hell,” she tells Haley. “Your grandfather was schizophrenic… we hid from him in the barn. Glad he shot himself before he shot one of us.”
Suicide attempts, dead babies, runaway boyfriends and older brothers dead before their time — After All packs a lot of anguish into its 104 minutes. This is a well-made, affecting tale from director Kerstin Karlhuber, who gets strong performances from all three female leads, but the road to forgiveness is kind of bleak.
Aside from the hardships everyone endures, After All takes a positive view of motherhood and family and it ends on a hopeful note.
For Ellen, having another look at the past seems to be what unlocks her future, whether that’s running into her feckless high school sweetheart or having a moment of clarity with a ghost.
In this role, Christensen is called upon to be simultaneously selfish, damaged, vulnerable and capable, a redemption she makes entirely believable throughout — yea, though she often walks through the valley of the shadow of melodrama.
Mind you, filmmaker Karlhuber has said in an interview that After All is based on real events; it’s interesting, as the story unfolds, how the absence of men seems to improve everything. Just an observation.
After All. Directed by Kerstin Karlhuber, written by Jack Bryant. Starring Erika Christensen, Penelope Ann Miller, and Kiara Muhammad. Available now on VOD.