Producers: Adele Romanski, Mark Ceryak and Barry Jenkins Director: Eva Victor Screenplay: Eva Victor Cast: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Louis Cancelmi, Kelly McCormack, Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch, Hetienne Park, E.R. Fightmaster, Cody Reiss, Jordan Mendoza, Liz Bishop, Conor Sweeney, Alison Wachtler, Jonny Myles, Pricilla Manning, Celeste Oliva and Chhoyang Cheshatsang Distributor: A24
Grade: B
Writer-director Eva Victor tackles a delicate subject—a young woman’s struggle to cope with the traumatic aftermath of sexual assault—in “Sorry, Baby,” but does so in a quirky fashion that sometimes feels more affected than affecting.
As befits a story about a grad student in a writing program who becomes a college English professor, it’s a very literary piece, presented in a series of five chapters shuffled out of chronological order. Agnes (Victor) is introduced welcoming Lydie (Naomi Ackie), her BFF, back to the house they shared as students at a liberal arts college in New England. As part of a giggly, dorm-room-style reunion punctuated by an astonishingly large number of F-bombs, Lydie reveals that she’s pregnant, which is something to celebrate. But Agnes is clearly still unsettled by an incident in her past over which Lydie commiserates with her, and when they go out to a dinner hosted by one of their erstwhile classmates, perpetually sour Natasha (Kelly McCormack), Lydie has to hold her hand under the table during the rough moments.
The next chapter jumps back to their grad school days, when Agnes was a favorite student of charming Professor Decker (Louis Cancelmi), the thesis advisor with whom she had an easy familiarity. One night he scheduled a conference not in his office but at his home, and it was then that something of a sexual nature occurred. We don’t witness the actual event: Victor presents it obliquely, shooting the house from outside in a series of shots from afternoon into the night, when Agnes emerges shaken and spent. (The sequence might remind you of the famous tracking-shot murder, from inside to the bustling street outside, in Hitchcock’s “Frenzy.”)
Agnes recounts what occurred to Lydie, who accompanies her to the hospital the next day, where a doctor responds brusquely when she says she hadn’t reported the incident to the police and had bathed before coming in for treatment. She does register a complaint with the college, but the administrators who meet with her—both women who say they couldn’t sympathize more—explain that as Decker has suddenly resigned, he’s no longer with the college and so isn’t subject to disciplinary action.
In the ensuing chapters Victor offers what amount to vignettes recounting how Agnes deals with the “bad thing” that happened to her at various stages of her advancement from graduate to TA and ultimately tenure-track professor at the college, leading a class studying—what else?—“Lolita.” In one scene she adopts a stray kitten, which she then attempts none too successfully to hide beneath her coat when she goes to a grocery to buy cat food. In another, she’s evasive when asked by a prosecutor during voir dire why she’d feel uncomfortable about serving on a jury.
Others show her reactions in dealing with men. In that grocery sequence, she’s taken aback when she sees a customer she thinks is Decker. But she enters a relationship with Gavin (Lucas Hedges), a shy but infatuated neighbor whose gentleness she appreciates. And when she has a panic attack while driving, she pulls into the parking lot of a diner whose owner (John Carroll Lynch) tries to shoo her away saying the place is closed but he sees her distress and winds up not only making her a sandwich but having a long talk with her about dealing with stuff.
The film circles back as Lydie returns for another visit, this time with her partner Fran (E.R. Fightmaster) and their infant. Though scared of the thought of being left alone the kid, Agnes agrees to babysit while the couple go off to visit other friends. And in a strained conversation with Natasha, jealous because her rival’s gotten the permanent faculty position she’d sought for herself, Agnes learns that Decker spread his dubious charms on a canvas larger than she’d thought.
“Sorry, Baby” mixes moments that are tender, unsettling, and queasily funny in unexpected combinations. What results is a sort of tragicomedy of intermingled joy and pain, and the mixture can seem clumsily forced. McCormack plays Natasha to the hilt, for example, but the character feels like a sitcom figure at odds with the more realistic ones around her. And though Hedges endows Gavin with genuine sweetness, that character too seems more a literary construct than a real human being. While the doctor is portrayed as simply insensitive, moreover, one can, to a certain extent, sympathize with his irritation with yet another patient who ignores the right way to deal with a sexual offender (and perhaps a serial one). The use of “Lolita,” moreover, is much too easy a touchstone for Agnes’ traumatic past.
The script also leaves one with lingering questions. Why did Decker resign? One suspects, given the administrators’ washing-their-hands-of-it attitude, that they’d arranged it with him after Agnes had indicated her intent to register a complaint, just to avoid trouble. When the department head informs Agnes of the decision to give her the plum faculty position, he notes that “former faculty” had recommended her. Was Decker among them? And of course the extent of his misconduct is never fully revealed.
But while you can quibble over some of writer Victor’s choices about such things, the overall result works despite the occasional misstep: the character of Agnes is a nuanced portrait of a woman both gifted and vulnerable, and as an actress Victor inhabits its various qualities with undeniable skill despite a few moments of exaggeration. And the rest of the cast is well chosen, with Ackie outstanding and Lynch a master of calibration as a fellow who initially seems gruffly dismissive but proves surprisingly perceptive.
Cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry, in collaboration with Victor, production designer Caity Birmingham and costumer Emily Costantino, uses the Massachusetts locations effectively to create a faintly claustrophobic atmosphere for Agnes’ story, while the editing by Alex O’Flinn and Randi Atkin is commendably unhurried and Lia Ouyang Rusli’s spare score avoids pushing the obvious emotional buttons overmuch.
“Sorry, Baby” is an intermittently satisfying exhibition of Victor’s considerable talent as writer, director and actor. It’s a debut feature imperfect like most, but of very real promise.