In Strange Weather, writer/director Katherine Dieckmann offers a unique take on what is essentially a Western. Darcy Baylor (Holly Hunter) is an administrative assistant at an unnamed university in Georgia. She lost her son Walker to suicide, and as the years have passed, she has survived her grief with the help of her friends, her intelligence, her humor and a sense of toughness embodied by the sinewy Hunter. She looks invulnerable, constantly smoking as if daring cancer to tell her otherwise.
A college dropout interested in literature, Darcy could take advantage of tuition assistance for university employees, but her grief prevents her from taking action. New information about her son’s final hours reveal that her son was not whom she thought he was, nor was their relationship idyllic. To worsen matters, Darcy discovers that the last man to see her son alive stole a business plan from Walker for a franchise of family restaurants and is now a millionaire. Darcy seeks this man out, packs the antique pistol that her son used to kill himself, and takes her best friend Byrd (Carrie Coon) along for a back roads journey Georgia to New Orleans.
The strange weather of the title is the climate change that provides the film with literary, almost biblical influences. Darcy’s journey is beset by drought in Georgia and floods in New Orleans, and the hand of God seems to steer her to resolution or fevered madness. With multiple references to William Faulkner, the women’s journey depicts a South so decayed that flood victims don’t know where to take shelter, and block after block of abandoned homes and buildings give way to a resplendent office tower. There are still cotton fields, automated and bereft of slaves.
This is the story of an aspiring literary major, a woman who believes such a course of study will improve how she perceives the world, so in its subtle way this is a movie about story. Darcy tells stories about herself and her son, conveniently omitting truths that made her look like a bad mother. She seeks stories from Walker’s classmates who were with him in his final hours. She is forced to get the final strands of her son’s narrative from a man who stole Walker’s story. Darcy is even confronted by Byrd for her inability to understand the many narratives caused by Walker’s death, including Byrd’s.
Most of all, Strange Weather is about Holly Hunter, an actor who simply hums at a different frequency, a force of nature that will not relinquish her hold on our attention until the credits roll. Hunter has been doing this since Raising Arizona and Broadcast News, and this drama helps reminds us what she is capable of. She captures all the vulnerability, intelligence, humor and toughness of her character that it is impossible to imagine another actor in the role. Despite her diminutive stature, she is immense onscreen, physically dominating larger actors with her ferocity, with the notable exceptions of Coon and the late Glenne Headley, who support Hunter’s tour-de-force.
In Strange Weather, time is at a standstill for Darcy Baylor while she mourns her loss. The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Faulkner would be proud.
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