Meadowland movie review & film summary (2015)

Sarah (Olivia Wilde) and Phil (Luke Wilson) pull over at a gas station in the opening scene of “Meadowland.” Their son goes into the bathroom and doesn’t come out. There was a door in the back of the restroom leading to the garage, the street, and the rest of the world, and he’s gone without a trace. As a father of three, even writing that sentence sends chills up my spine. I can’t imagine the pain. And “Meadowland” wastes no time jumping into that bottomless well. This will be a movie about grief. This will be a movie about suffering.

“Meadowland” jumps forward a year to reveal Sarah and Phil quietly imploding over the disappearance. They try to go about relatively normal lives—Sarah is a teacher, Phil a cop—but the lack of resolution seems to be one of the most haunting elements of daily life. They can’t even bury their child. And cops come with pictures of children found on the internet or in raids and ask if it’s their son. Sarah refuses to even look anymore, while Phil seems to hold out a glimmer of hope that he’ll be found.

Sarah also happens to be a teacher, a far-too-convenient storytelling device for Morano. In an early scene, her students are reading poetry about how your eyes adjust to the dark—“You don’t know when it’s going to be light again. It might just keep getting darker.” This kind of self-aware scripting pops up again and again in “Meadowland.” The movie actually works best when Sarah and Phil are silent, as Morano, a cinematographer by trade who also shot this film, captures the gloomy, overcast existence of two people living in misery. The problems lie in Chris Rossi’s over-explanatory script, which almost seems to be pushing and pulling with Morano’s more dreamlike visual style and emotional skill with the actors.

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