Bleak and beautiful, GAS FOOD LODGING is a richly evocative look at lives in waiting.
Nora (Brooke Adams) is a divorced truck stop waitress in Laramie, New Mexico, the kind of place people barely notice unless they need to fill up one way or the other. Her older daughter, the beautiful Trudi (Ione Skye), is bored and rebellious, fast becoming the town tramp; her younger daughter,
Shade (Fairuza Balk), is immersed in the fantasy world of Mexican exploitation movies. During the course of the film, all three women find various degrees of emotional satisfaction, Trudi with the offbeat Dank (Robert Knepper), an English geologist; Shade with a Mexican neighbor, Javier (Jacob
Vargas); and Nora with the man who comes to install their satellite dish.
Based on Richard Peck's Don't Look and It Won't Hurt, GAS FOOD LODGING is a film about women--and, to a lesser degree, men--whose lives are so circumscribed that every dust mote and heat ripple over the blacktop is charged with significance. Nora, Trudi, and Shade each react to the painful
emptiness of their world differently, but are united by their single-minded determination to force meaning into their lives. Through these three women, Anders examines racism, economic oppression and the numbing effect of the infinite highway--America's favorite "boy" metaphor for existence--on
the lives of those who wait by the roadside.
Anders has a fine eye for detail: a near-empty movie theater, cave walls turned by ultraviolet light into a shimmering fantasy of glowing colors, a box of buttons and other worthless treasures carefully hidden beneath a bed. She has also coaxed fine performances from Adams, Skye and, especially,
Balk (RETURN TO OZ, VALMONT), who miraculously delineates the prickly world of the awkwardly bright adolescent without ever becoming cloying. leave a comment
