For the three women in Gas Food Lodging relationships with men have been much like an overnight stop on a lonely stretch of highway, except it’s the men who leave the next morning. It’s a fit metaphor for the characters in Anders’ directorial debut — a divorced mother and her two teenaged daughters, long ago abandoned by a wandering husband and father — but one that doesn’t really connect in the way it should. Set in the nondescript town of Laramie, New Mexico, this movie has a fleeting resemblance to The Last Picture Show in its depiction of the no-way-out monotony of small-town life. Unlike that 1971 film, however, there’s nothing remotely sentimental or romanticized here — it’s as if everything dead-ends in this spot, except for the desert, a mysterious place in which hope finds bloom and color in an otherwise barren landscape. For young Shade, the film’s narrator, the prospect of a better life is embodied by a character in the Mexican films she faithfully attends at matinee showings. This inspiration is Elvia Rivero, a not particularly talented B-movie actress whose onscreen life seems to hold the solutions to Shade’s crumbling family’s problems, the most important being finding a new husband for her mother. It’s too bad that Gas Food Lodging is as disconnected as it is because there’s a real current of feeling here, especially in Balk’s sympathetic performance and the film’s unflinching depiction of a single woman trying to raise a family on her own. Rather than make a lasting impression, it makes only a passing one, as impermanent as the momentary view of a dying town on the highway.
This article appears in November 27 • 1992 (Cover).
