Less than 24 hours after she nearly overdosed, a young woman sets out on a road trip with her father to an unknown destination. The father, played by Ewan McGregor, is shaken by his daughter’s very recent overdose that nearly caused her to die, and he tries to impress upon her just how serious the situation really is. “Your face turned blue!” he tells her, desperately trying to get through to her despite her flippant attitude and seeming desire to just brush the whole thing off as an accident. The moment he says this, though, you start to notice that blue is everywhere in this film. It permeates it, coloring everything from the daughter’s shirt to the father’s car to the Jell-o she consumes while on the road, a fitting metaphor for the lack of oxygen present not just in the daughter’s overdose but also in her relationship with her father, as well.
Emma Westenberg’s first feature length film, Bleeding Love, is a quiet story about the fractured bonds that sometimes exist between a father and daughter, especially if that father has been largely absent from his daughter’s life. Ewan McGregor and his real-life daughter Clara star as this complicated duo, and if you feel like their chemistry on screen is deeply believable, this is most likely why that’s the case. In fact, both Clara and Ewan have stated in interviews that some of the film’s dramatic tension is partially inspired by their own off-screen relationship. Clara is convincing as the stubborn twentysomething who is willing to try anything to escape her own mental anguish, and nepo-baby talk aside, she’s generally persuasive in her role. In fact, even though Ewan is the more experienced and seasoned of the two, it’s Clara who really brings this fairly basic film to life.
Because Bleeding Love is really fairly basic. The story is so one note that it hardly offers anything new or exciting to the troubled road trip genre (think Little Miss Sunshine-core). The father and daughter—who are unnamed in the film—go through all the usual dramas of intense arguments about feelings of abandonment coupled with more tender moments where both characters let their guards down, and we finally get to see just how much love the two have for one another (there is a particularly charming scene in which Ewan and Clara sing, you guessed it, Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” to pleasurable results). But the story never really offers up any new viewpoints or challenges, so that by the time the movie’s over, we’re nearly groaning from lack of originality.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—Bleeding Love isn’t a terrible movie—but it can sometimes be frustrating to feel like you can see every twist and turn coming from a mile away. Still, it’s an honest first attempt from Westenberg, and it will be interesting to see what direction she goes in next. In general, though, Bleeding Love is a heartwarming first film. Just don’t expect it to cut you open in any new or exciting ways.
Photo courtesy of Vertical
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