Gas Food Lodging

Director: Allison Anders

Starring: Brooke Adams, Fairuza Balk, Ione Skye, James Brolin

Allison Anders' 1992 directorial debut, Gas Food Lodging, offers an honest, unflinching and heartwarming glimpse of the pain, struggles and joys shared by mothers and daughters. The film tells the story of Nora (Brooke Adams), a truck-stop waitress and single mother struggling to raise two daughters - Shade (Fairuza Balk) and Trudi (Ione Skye) - in Laramie, New Mexico, a one-horse town that exists solely to offer passing travelers the prerequisite gas, food and lodging.

Older daughter Trudi rebels at every opportunity, skipping school and earning a reputation for promiscuity. Shade, on the other hand, adopts the role of the "good" daughter, spending most of her free time alone at a local matinee house that specializes in old Mexican melodramas. Not surprisingly, Nora is too wrapped up in trying to keep the family fed and sheltered to take much notice of her daughters' ongoing trials and tribulations.

The film's central theme is that people are shaped by their personal decisions and the circumstances that life hands them. Though all three main characters are still suffering from the effects of being abandoned by Trudi and Shade's father, each responds to this loss in different ways. Nora builds up an emotional wall in an attempt to make herself impenetrable to hurt. Shade, by contrast, overly romanticizes the notion of the traditional family and convinces herself that all her mother needs is a man to make that a reality. Trudi's experiences with men - abandonment by her father and losing her virginity by being gang raped - leaves her both distrustful of them and all too willing to use sex to gain their acceptance.

Nevertheless, Nora, Shade and Trudi eventually do meet men they can place their trust in. Nora begins dating her neighbor Hamlet Humphrey, an eccentric satellite dish salesman. Shade has her first awakening to love with Javier, an unlikely Mexican-American boyfriend. Trudi falls for Dank, a British rock hunter passing through town. Though Dank apparently leaves her pregnant and emotionally wounded, things aren't as clear as they seem.

Anders' characters face a variety of modern social ills: from deadbeat fathers, to Trudi's rape to the racism that Javier must deal with. However, the director wisely refuses to make them poster children for these issues or allow her characters to be overshadowed by them. Unlike many filmmakers, Anders trusts her audience to discern the difference between right and wrong, and for Anders' characters, life's shortcomings are simply the realities they must navigate every day. How they cope with them is what moves the film forward.

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