All still images via film-grab.com
This is the third installment of our series where our participating contributors pick one scene from any particular film that made them tense and nervous.
*WARNING: Spoilers ahead* On a beautiful Friday afternoon in late September 2013, I took in a matinee screening for one of my favorite films of all-time: Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12. Academy Award winners Brie Larson (Grace) and Rami Malek (Nate) appear alongside a great cast ensemble that features LaKeith Stanfield (Marcus), John Gallagher, Jr. (Mason), and Kaitlyn Dever (Jayden).
PTSD, depression, self-harm, violent outbursts, screaming, aftereffects of incest, running away, an unfeeling jackass boss, fear of commitment, numbness to intimacy, a suicide attempt, cracking of jokes, smashing of a lamp, avoidance of opening up to others, a painful musical scene about real life, and ultimately the love that non-blood related individuals can have for one another engulfed my brain and soul with thoughts and feelings that led me to walk out of Sacramento’s Tower Theatre eastbound on Broadway at its conclusion stunned. I told my mother on the phone to see it. And then I walked some more, realizing that this was a rare film experience that flies over the base excuse of escapism for little journeys to the local cinema. No, this was a movie that would never leave my psyche. It understood some of me without ever knowing me.
The act III scene that had me internally yelling my head off for a reckoning in the auditorium involves incest survivor and group home counselor Grace (Larson) and Jayden (Dever), a teen who struggles with anger and self-harm. Grace suspects that Jayden’s father abuses her. She is enraged when she learns that Jayden was allowed to be picked up by her father, despite concerns for her well-being.
Pregnant and not giving a shit, Grace breaks into their house with the goal of beating his sleeping scummy ass with a baseball bat. Jayden stops her. And they walk outside. Sitting together, Grace reveals to Jayden that her own father raped and impregnated her, forcing her to have an abortion and to testify in court to put him in prison. In turn, Jayden reveals bruises on her torso, inflicted by her father. In response to this heartbreaking exchange of lived traumas, Jayden takes the baseball bat and breaks a few of Daddy Dearest’s car windows. Offering the bat to Grace, she climbs atop the car hood and proceeds to bash in the windshield. And then they ride away together back to Short Term 12 on a bicycle, like sisters from other mothers.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s screenplay won him one of five Academy Nicholl Fellowships in 2010 from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. How the finished film was never given recognition by The Oscars, BAFTAs, or the Golden Globes is certainly one of the laugh-out-loud moments of “what the damn were they thinking!?” Brie Larson won her first Oscar for her role as survivor Joy “Ma” Newsome in Room (2015). But I like to think of her win as a delayed response to her genius of character inhabitation, which she achieved with Grace—and that ole baseball bat of vengeance.
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