Directed by: Sean Price Williams
Distributed by: Utopia
Written by Michael Clawson
80/100
Early in “The Sweet East,” chaos erupts when a gun-toting conspiracy theorist bursts into a D.C. karaoke bar and screams at the bartender to show him the bar’s basement, believing that the establishment is a front for a child sex trafficking ring. Paired with the casting of Andy Milonakis as the gunman, this comic reference to Pizzagate quickly establishes “The Sweet East” as a film that’s clued into pop culture and the political climate of America today. How high-school student Lillian (Talia Ryder) manages to flee the scene is a gesture towards the droll sense of humor and fantastic bent that characterizes the film’s rollicking, absurdist remainder. Along with a leftist punk she only just met, Lillian escapes through a hidden tunnel in the bathroom – like something out of a haunted mansion – and spots an incriminating children’s tricycle on her way out.
As a commentary on the socio-political landscape of contemporary America, “The Sweet East” is satirical, but clearly, and mercifully, not self-serious. Director Sean Price Williams and screenwriter Nick Pinkerton do no moralizing or finger-wagging as they chart a vaguely surrealistic journey for Lillian across the American Northeast, where she encounters and immerses herself in a small handful of ideological groups. Lillian’s run-in with Milonakis’ unhinged truther is followed by time with a band of left-wing activists (whose grubby living conditions mask their privileged upbringings), a neo-Nazi university lecturer played by Simon Rex, a liberal indie film crew, and a group of sexually repressed Muslim bassheads, all of whom project their desires and values onto the naively carefree Lillian. Through her alluring unreadability, Ryder allows Lillian to function like a mirror as she amiably drifts between subcultures, like Alice rambling from one weird corner of Wonderland to another.
The aesthetics, which are a total delight, dovetail with the film’s political provocations. The film’s title alone echoes D.W. Griffith’s “Way Down East,” whose star was also named Lillian (cinephilic references abound as freely as one might expect from a film critic penning his first script, and a director with a famously encyclopedic knowledge of cinema). But “The Sweet East” isn’t an act of mere trolling or button-pushing, as some might think. Lillian’s blasé reaction to everyone she meets might be read as offensive indifference on the part of the film’s creators, but Lillian’s nonchalance strikes me as that of an unformed teenager to whom American culture looks like some kind of weird and alienating cartoon. Perhaps she’ll engage if and when her political identity takes more solid shape, but based on what her adventure brings her in contact with, her laughing in the end doesn’t seem like a terribly surprising response.
“The Sweet East” Trailer
Michael Clawson is a member of the Seattle Film Critic Society you can follow his passion for film on Letterboxd.