Kerry Bishé in Sylvania
There’s arrested development and then there’s whatever Stewart (Morgan Beck) is going through: deciding that his family were all too glued to their smartphones, he upped and moved his wife Gracie (Kerry Bishé, Halt and Catch Fire) and teenaged son Trent (Graham Verchere) from Chicago to rural Missouri, disallowing cell phones, and stocking the house with only things that would have been available in the 1990s. Gracie, whose advertising career pays the bills, is allowed a laptop and internet access while Stewart, long unemployed, films their lives on a camcorder and procrastinates editing his footage together into a documentary. Gracie and Stewart have since had another baby, and now that they’re some distance into this experiment as the sleep-deprived parents of a four-month-old, small simmering hostilities start to boil over, and Gracie blurts out that maybe they should split up. That issue has to be tabled for the moment, though: the family is packing up to hit the road to visit Gracie’s long-estranged father, Frank (Paul Dillon). Frank has the beginning stages of dementia; Gracie knows he needs help, but is unsure how to convince him.
The old saw about road trip movies is that it’s the journey and not the destination, but in Sylvania it surprisingly turns out to be the opposite. As somebody known to wallow in ‘90s nostalgia myself, I found Stewart’s weird predilections for the era endearing and, honestly, pretty funny (because at least I’m not that bad!). But the marriage split storyline in the early going felt rushed, the arguments about replacing toilet paper rolls and the like a little too on-the-nose. Throughout the road trip portion of the movie, I wasn’t quite sure if I had really bought into the story.
But writer/director Kyle Smith turns things around once the family finally arrives at Frank’s house. Dillon’s Frank is cutting, mean-spirited, and stubborn on the outside, but caring and a little scared on the inside. So far, his dementia leaves him spaced out at times, but he still has the memories of his youth with his family; those memories are what he’s lived in for the dozen years since Gracie stopped contact. In the scenes at his house, the narrative shifts and it really becomes Gracie’s story as she engages with her father, begging him to get help but also mining him for stories of the long-dead mother she never really knew. The last half of the movie belongs to Bishé, and she gives a truly emotionally resonant performance.
Sylvania was filmed throughout Missouri, including locations in Columbia, Osage Beach, Jefferson City, and even Wentzville (shoutout to Pete’s Diner, est. 1966!). Given Stewart’s ‘90s bent (he even rocks mixtapes—on actual tapes!—during the road trip), it’s great that the moviemakers sprung for period appropriate needle drops by the likes of Goo Goo Dolls, Cracker, Son Volt, Galaxie 500, even so-obscure-they-only-ever-released-one-phenomenal-3-song-EP shoegaze band Ozean. (Can you tell Stewart was a wannabe music journo when he and Gracie got married?). The excellent music continues with Mary Lattimore’s evocative score, composed of synth chords underneath a fluttering harp.
Despite an uneven first half, strong performances in the back half paired with strong emotional material and backed by excellent music throughout makes Sylvania, on balance, a film worth checking out. | Jason Green
Sylvania will screen at the Chase Park Plaza (212 Kingshighway Blvd.) on Friday, November 7 at 5:00 pm as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival 2025. The film is paired with the short film They Needed Soldiers and will be followed by a Q&A. Single film tickets are $15 for general admission, $12 for Cinema St. Louis members and students with valid current photo IDs. Multi-film and all-access passes are also available. Further information is available here.
