Katie Holmes Directs All We Had

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on All We Had.

To say Rita Carmichael is Katie Holmes’s best role and best performance to date seems almost like a backhanded compliment. After all, Joey Potter aside, what else comes close to that description? Nevertheless, there’s no denying that Holmes has thrown herself into the role of this drunk single mother whose solution to her problems is putting “all we had” into their car and driving away, hoping the signs (on the road and, you know, of the universe) lead her to where she needs to be.

Holmes is a prickly presence on screen as Rita, finding ways of making her sunken eyes and oft-mimicked mouth quirks work to her advantage to sketch out this clearly broken woman who’s trying her darndest to offer her teenage daughter (a solid Stefania Owen in white trash Rory Gilmore-mode) a better life but obviously failing miserably. The film opens with the type of scene the screenplay surely believes functions as a perfect metaphor for the narrative as a whole: “You have to push me,” Rita urges her daughter as she stands on a chair in a bathroom, a string wrapped around an infected tooth. The scene is later replayed, as if we need reminding that in this mother-daughter duo the young one is the more responsible one, the one who's left to make the necessary hard choices for them to live another day on the road even as the film squarely puts them in the middle of the financial crisis making their journey that much harder.

Overall, All We Had functions as a great acting showcase but it never quite settles into its own rhythms. Given its episodic nature (owing perhaps to the film’s source material, the Annie Weatherwax novel of the same name), and its odd blend of neatly packaged YA clichés in a rather well-intentioned attempt at socio-economic commentary (the script was written by Faults in Our Stars writer/director Josh Boone), it’s no surprise the film flounders under its own weight.

Its most interesting subplot (there are several, including Mark Consuelos as a real estate agent, Richard Kind as a well-meaning diner owner, Kimmy Schmidtt’s Katherine Reis as a high school mean girl, Siobhan Fallon as a school principal) is the one centered on Peter Pam, a trans waitress at the diner who one worries will become a mere plot device but who instead becomes a surprisingly well-rounded character that almost made me wish the film knew what it had in its hands. Prop to Eve Lindley who I hope we see in more things in the future.

At the end of the day, this is a solid debut for Holmes (her work with actors is very promising and while the lens-flares-filled sky shots are a bit much, she finds unfussy compositions for her shots that suggest an attuned eye for drama in the frame). Here’s hoping she finds stronger material in the future.

Grade: C+/Katie Holmes B+