Sabrina Carpenter

(On Cable TV, October 2022) There are movies you’re looking forward to watch and then there are… the others. The plot summary of The Short History of the Long Road is not particularly compelling—something about a young woman learning to live on the road after some unspecified strategy. It gets much worse fifteen minutes into the film, as a nomadic daughter/father team is devastated by the unexpected death of the older man, leaving a teenage girl to fend for herself without a fixed address, without formal schooling and without any way to find her missing mother. If you want to shut off the film after its dispiriting conclusion, well, I won’t blame you. But if you stick around, the film does get more engaging. For one thing, Sabrina Carpenter has that plucky underdog appeal that goes a long way in getting us to stick around to see what is going to happen. For another, Danny Trejo shows up in a heartwarming role. Finally (but this is something that you’ll only figure out once the film is over), nothing really terrible happens to the heroine after the death of her father—it’s tough going and not always fun but the heroine doesn’t get abused, dismembered or sold into slavery. This is, in other words, a bit of a dramatic comedy but it’s not always obvious in the moment. Writer-director Ani Simon-Kennedy carefully doses her effect and goes for small moments rather than big gestures—there’s a tricky sequence late in the film about the character not quite finding what she’s looking for that’s rather well handled, and that steadiness is emblematic to how the entire film is delivered. The Short History of the Long Road is not going to end up on my year’s end favourite list, but it exceeded my low expectation and made a mild fan out of a skeptic, which is not inconsiderable.