Sweet Virginia – A Movie A Day #86
Sweet Virginia – A Movie A Day #86
Ever since the first season of The Walking Dead, I’ve been a big fan of Jon Bernthal. Any time I see that he’s in a movie or TV show, I make a point to see it. So, when I came across Sweet Virginia during one of my extended Netflix browsing sessions, I queued it up and watched it pretty quickly (after a bit more browsing, of course).
Sweet Virginia is a crime drama that begins with the murder of three men in a bar. The killings seem premeditated, and as the plot unfolds, we discover more and more connections between the main characters. Jon Bernthal stars as Sam, a retired bull rider who has mostly retreated from the world. He lives a mostly solitary life in the motel he owns and manages, but the few relationships he does have are extremely meaningful. Sam’s life is changed by the murders as coincidences and connections bring Sam, the murderer, and woman he loves together in the aftermath of the small-town tragedy.
There’s a lot more to the plot than what I’m saying, but finding out who knows whom and how people are connected is one of the biggest draws of Sweet Virginia, so I don’t really want to say any more about that. Learning about what is happening, often before the characters themselves, creates some really great tension throughout the movie. Sweet Virginia is a rather quiet movie most of the time, but I think that helped make the big impacts even more impactful.
There are a few times where the coincidences seem like a bit of a stretch, but it’s all still plausible and doesn’t detract from the flow of the movie. Beyond just the plot though, I think the characters are what really make Sweet Virginia excellent.
Jon Bernthal tends to play tough guys. Sometimes they have a heart and sometimes they don’t, but most of Bernthal’s performances seem to come across as strong, no-nonsense guys. There’s some of that persona in the character of Sam, but part of Sam’s history involves a bull-riding injury that has left him with a strong limp and a noticeable shake in his hand. Sam isn’t physically terribly strong anymore. Plus, Sam is quiet around others and mostly just wants to be left alone. He’s not prone to standing up to people even when he needs to, but his outlook is tested throughout the course of the movie. It was really cool seeing Jon Bernthal play this kind of role since the things I predominantly associate him with are The Punisher and Shane from The Walking Dead. Bernthal did a great job as Sam.
The rest of the cast is great as well. Imogen Poots and Rosemarie DeWitt play widows of two of the murdered men, and they each have very different paths after the deaths of their husbands. They’re both strong in their own ways, but they also have secrets that are weighing them down. The man who did the killings is Christopher Abbott, an actor I know best from It Comes at Night. Abbot plays his character of Elwood as mentally unstable with dangerously frightening anger issues. Elwood provides a level of tension in every scene he’s in that grows more and more as the movie goes along. You end up just waiting for him to explode at some point, but by that time you don’t want anything to happen to the people around him. It’s all done very well.
So yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed Sweet Virginia. Like I said, it’s kind of a quiet, character-based movie, but you can eventually see the plot points start to converge and crash into each other towards the end. The strong characterizations help make the convergence that much more meaningful.