(2009) Back home in Southern California from another long haul in her big rig, Diane Ford (Michelle Monaghan) - pretty at 30 in blue jeans and cowboy boots - goes out drinking and dancing with her neighborhood pal Runner (Nathan Fillion), a vet with a wound and a wife Molly.

Leaving Runner blotto on his porch, she walks back to her one-bedroom house to find Jenny Bell Bonner (Joey Lauren Adams) waiting for her with Peter, her eleven-year-old son whom she hasn't seen for ten years (by agreement and previous arrangement with her ex). Jenny explains that because Lenny (Benjamin Bratt) is in the hospital with colon cancer and she has to leave for her mother's funeral, there was no one else to ask to look after the boy for three weeks.

In directing his first feature film, for which he also wrote the screenplay, James Mottern keeps this modest blue-collar story real, shunning sentimentality. Diane's a bitch and Peter's a pain in the ass.

Having no other option, she takes the boy along in her semitrailer cab to Oklahoma City, during which they produce friction - she seems to lack any mothering instinct and he resents being with her away from his dad, his only friend - such that Peter refuses to speak to her most of the way back.

Her unusual relationship with childless Runner ("a six of diamonds of all trades"), who makes efforts to earn Peter's trust, gets more complicated: "I've never thought about a woman the way I think about you."

Diane likes being her own boss, having just paid off her truck, but unwittingly the kid makes inroads across the borders of her emotions. Getting acquainted she tells her son how she at 18 and his dad met, he, a handsome young man, getting off a bus with his baseball team, and vaguely why she left (couldn't be a conventional housewife); but when Peter asks her, "Did you love me?," she changes to the passing lane and accelerates away. Peter, however, as she teaches him in playing baseball, keeps his eye on the ball.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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