Stories of the triumph of the human spirit can be a comfort, a balm to lift up spirits when the world has you feeling like one big raw nerve. Whether it’s a plucky protagonist who, against all odds, is able to realize a dream, or your favorite superheroes finally banding together to thwart evil after grasping the “no ‘I’ in ‘team’” concept, these narratives offer comfort that despite a seemingly uncaring universe, we have the inner strength and the outer help of a community to overcome adversity. Resembling an Irish Lifetime Movie of the Week, much of the running time of Herself is spent stacking the deck against Sandra (Dunne, who co-wrote this script with Malcolm Campbell), but fret not, clear skies await just over the horizon.
Herself is set within the framework of the Dublin housing crisis, which due to various economic factors (not the least of which is a lack of public housing) has seen more than 10,000 people without homes in recent years, many of them single mothers. Sandra is one of those moms, raising two young girls, barely keeping afloat with various jobs, and trying to untangle herself from an abusive ex-partner – Gary (Anderson), who in the first 10 minutes brutally assaults her, fracturing her wrist. Sandra and kids flee down the rabbit hole of inept bureaucracy (you can tell this because her caseworker’s desk is a comedic mountain of file folders) and wind up with temporary lodgings in a hotel at the airport. One evening, Sandra has an epiphany about just getting a plot of land and building her own house, and, through the magic of the internet, comes up with a plan, aided by Peggy (Walter), a semiretired doctor whose gruff exterior masks a gentle heart. Slowly but surely, ostensibly by happenstance (but actually just movie magic providence), Sandra gets together a group of kind souls to assist the construction of her “tiny house,” headed by Aido (Hill), a contractor she meets outside a hardware store, whose gruff exterior masks a, well, you get the idea. After one of her daughters sustains a minor scrape on the construction site, Gary tries to throw a monkey wrench into the works by seeking custody, so it’s off to court for Sandra. It speaks to the movie’s soppy tone that what could have been quickly resolved by a single detail gets drawn out for labored tension, culminating in the always crowd-pleasing “rousing courtroom speech.”
Dunne does give it her all, though. Her performance is the reason the film exists. She gives Sandra subtle dimensions in an otherwise obvious story, and eschews any depiction of Sandra as a victim. The other actors don’t fare as well, but that they don’t have much to work with. Gary’s character may as well have just been called “generic abusive husband,” the altruistic souls that come to aid Sandra’s plight “co-worker/random mom from school/complete stranger with a heart of gold.” As a shot of dopamine, Herself ticks off all the standard boxes of restoring faith in humanity, but it is a temporary and unmemorable high.
This article appears in January 1 • 2021.