Yelling to the Sky | Review

Shout It Out: Mahoney’s Debut an Uneasy Mix of Style Over Substance

It’s not quite accurate to call Victoria Mahoney’s directorial and screenwriting debut, Yelling to the Sky, a failed effort, but its attempts to relate the rough and tumble adolescence of a young girl’s life in a mixed race Queens household feel overly familiar and not quite fully realized. However, Mahoney’s nascent talents as a director are frequently on display here, though her stylish flourishes would have perhaps been more at home on something that wasn’t a semi-autobiographical treatment of a subject, that, because of its casting and narrative similarities, will be unfavorably compared to 2009’s more compelling and divisive Precious.

Set in an almost indistinguishable time period in Queens, Sweetness O’Hara (Zoe Kravitz) and her older sister, Ola (Antonique Smith) depend on each other, combating other violently inclined teenagers from surrounding neighborhoods, like the begrudging bully Latonya (Gabourey Sidibe), who seems to have a special hatred for Sweetness. While they are children of an interracial relationship, none of their problems seem specific to this detail. Yet homelife seems even more dire, where their black mother, Lorene (Yolonda Ross), suffering from an unnamed mental illness, keeps to herself, as their white father, Gordon (Jason Clarke), is a physically abusive alcoholic, though he is often completely absent. The very pregnant Ola leaves the home, while Lorene also mysteriously disappears without a word, leaving young Sweetness to fend for herself. A counselor at school, Coleman (Tim Blake Nelson), seems to take an interest in her welfare, but Sweetness decides that if she’s to stay in her neighborhood, she needs to harden up. She visits the local and kind-hearted drug dealer, Roland (Tariq Trotter), who sets her up to peddle, and she quickly falls into a friendship with girls that had previously antagonized her, like Fatima (Shareeka Epps). Between getting revenge on Latonya, the return of the prodigal Ola (with baby in tow), and the return of her missing mother, Sweetness soon learns that the hard road is not the right path to take, but just making better choices may not be the only thing she needs to do to change her course.

While this was Gabourey Sidibe’s followup to her starmaking turn in Precious (though she would have two more notable films see theatrical release before this, including Tower Heist and Seven Psychopaths), her presence queues us up for another hellacious journey into the life of a disenfranchised teen (not to mention, Yolonda Ross has a strikingly similar role in 2012’s indie darling, Four). But while Zoe Kravitz’s similarly named Sweetness thankfully doesn’t suffer the same depraved existence as Sidibe’s reference point, her presence as an intriguing and well written protagonist is decidedly lacking. While most of the physical abuse exacted by her father happens off screen, there’s a frustrating lack of characterization for Sweetness and her family. Clarke, a certifiable creep at the film’s beginning, for some reason does a complete 180. Yelling to the Sky has an arresting opening sequence, and sets us up for a narrative that has all the bells and whistles of a Faulkner throwback, but it’s not long before Mahoney’s distinct stylizations override the visible content. It doesn’t help that Kravitz, while a beautiful young woman, doesn’t quite grab the attention that Antonique Smith does (who also managed to turn in a notable performance as Faith Evans in 2009’s subpar Notorious). And while Mahoney’s aggravating insistence on denying confirmation of the time period, what with vintage clothes, cars, and not to mention rotary phones dominating the details (until we’re treated to some Obama posters) may not be a crippling flourish, a Godardian use of soundtrack splicing (an awkward melding of hip hop and Jonie Mitchell, meant to signify the internal struggle of Sweetness as innocent teen to drug dealing diva), feels jarringly out of place. Yelling to the Sky comes across like a frenetic bag of disenfranchised teen angst that is never clearly spelled out, tossed in a thick lather of false finale, where we get the rather truncated mending of broken relationships, crippling anything compelling it had to say as well.