Cook County | Review

Meth addiction, that rural borne demon, is no stranger to the art house scene after 2010’s excellent Winter’s Bone, and once again gets front and center stage in director David Pomes’ 2009 directorial debut, Cook County. While mostly a gritty, no-nonsense tale of familial bonds marred by drug use in a small Texas town, the film insists on bringing its audience to the brink of Grand Mal tragedy after it unwisely grants glimpses of an easier, less dramatic redemption for its characters along the way. Unwieldy and uncharismatic as it may appear, however, Pomes’ debut has moments of disturbing brevity, and is strangely a nostalgic portrait of people at the cusp of the meth crises, not entirely aware of what it was or what it would do to them.

Set in the rural oblivion of East Texas, Ryan Donowho stars as Abe, a seventeen year old lost boy struggling to get by on a day to day basis living with his uncle Bump (Anson Mount), a crazed meth addict dealer, who has turned their house into a meth lab. Abe does his best to protect his six year old cousin, Deandra from a father who contemplates selling her body to a local pedophile and trying to get her to smoke meth out of a cracked light bulb. Out of nowhere appears Sonny (Xander Berkley), fresh from a two and a half year stint in prison. Unbeknownst to his troubled family, Sonny is unable to explain his whereabouts for the past two years and he’s not questioned too closely about why he’s been gone. It’s more alarming to Bump that his rehabilitated brother aims on taking Abe out of the squalid environment. Trouble rears its foreboding head when it becomes obvious that Abe refuses to leave Deandre behind with her monster of a father. Meanwhile, it’s revealed that Sonny cut a deal to get a reduced sentence—a deal that necessitated his becoming an informant. But being constantly harassed by narcotics officers, Sonny is unable to make any definite moves towards helping his son or niece. Events spiral out of control as Bump gets more and more crazed with his drug use, resulting in a reckoning for the tenants of the downtrodden meth lab house.

What bogs down Cook County beyond repair is an undeniable lack of clarity and absence of focus, bouncing around like a narrative whose tragic finale was conceived well before the avenues it would take to get there were planned. While the three male leads all give noteworthy performances as drug addled urchins with no direction home, the father/son relationship between Abe and Sonny feels underwritten. Their chemistry and motivations absent, the audience is instructed to care for them unconditionally upon introduction only because they’re the “good guys,” one a victim of circumstance, the other a fallen authority figure desperately (but nonsensically) seeking half-assed redemption.

Sonny, as played by Xander Berkeley (the perpetual poor man’s Bruce Willis) suffers the most, his situation and agreement with the law ambiguously illustrated, which is odd considering director Pomes started out as a lawyer before turning to film. Why it is that Sonny deposits his son and niece in a safe house with relatives only to throw them back into a ravaged meth den seems cruel and unusual, mitigating the tragedy that follows.

While Anson Mount gives a delightfully cracked-out performance as the goofily named Uncle Bump, his craziness floats out of orbit from the rest of the film, an unconstrained element that could bounce in and out of frame randomly, it seems. But just as much as Mount gives us a delicious, scene-stealing performance, his sinewy, ropy body never quite looks like it belongs to that of a ravaged meth addict. Instead, he rather resembles a healthily starved model, his sweaty, wet hair always looking glossy, his scruff always faux hipster, a sort of meth head chic. We see him yank a tooth out of his maw, but he never really seems to get that unsightly meth mouth. In other words, Mount never looks sullied enough to be realistic, unlike, say, Donowho, who slinks around like a strung out alley cat.

While Pomes is able to capture a sort of sick realism about meth, it fails to offer anything more chilling than what’s already been derived from any number of news specials or documentaries (hell, even billboards) already published on the subject. Without its main star, Meth, Cook County is an exhausted narrative about bad blood between kinfolk, with a father/son duo so underwritten they might as well be strangers.

Rating 2.5 stars