Posted on 02/14/2024 10:10:39 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
Suncoast is the hospice facility where Terri Schiavo died.
The movie is about a family with a teenage boy who is in the final stages of a terminal illness and goes to Suncoast at the same time Terri Schiavo is there. He has been unresponsive for years, and his body is finally giving out.
His family, his mother (Laura Linney) and his 16-year old sister (Nico Parker) have spent the past seven years caring for him. Woody Harrelson plays a Schiavo protester who befriends the daughter and teaches her to drive because her mother is obsessed with taking care of her dying son.
It is a nice human story. Respect for human life is one of its themes. The characters are all likable people, even the mean girls.
It is well worth seeing.
I’ve only been FReeping since 2005. So yes, I’m a newbie.
But I vaguely remember the Terri threads.
https://freerepublic.com/tag/schiavo/index?tab=articles
They were brutal. Heated. Hostile and viral.
Oh... so the movie is connected to Terri’s story. The trailer doesn’t make that clear. Thanks for the recommendation
I forgot to mention that it is somewhat autobiographical of the writer/director who helped her mother care for her terminally ill brother
Thanks. I scanned the Sundance list and watched four films from their online offerings, but I missed this one. I'm not sure how; I would have at least checked it out because Woody Harrelson is in it. Woody continues to crop up in some surprising places. He may be the most unpredictable actor on the scene today.
I suspect that Sundance didn't make Suncoast available for online viewing, which would be why I overlooked it. It's on my watchlist now.
Is Jeb! In it?
Woody Harrelson is perhaps one of the bravest actors of all time, always taking projects that appeal to his need for challenge and improving his craft while money and fame, beyond necessary tools , aren’t primary motivations. Whether a good guy or bad doesn’t matter - he always brings a hook that draws one into the character he’s portraying.
Just don’t refuse him a Twinkie snack if you have one he wants.
I don’t think I can re-live the Terri Schiavo thing. It was just too heart wrenching.
The protesters are a part of the plot, but it doesn’t dwell on them. It’s actually an uplifting movie. Life is hard, but people survive. It’s not a woke movie, and there isn’t one gender-deranged character in it, and the people in it are likable and it has a decent, logical plot and pretty good dialog. That’s about as good as it gets, movie-wise, these days.
Looping in the movie ping list.
I’ll stay out of spoilers. I will note, however, that this is written and directed by a relative unknown, Laura Chinn. She is not a big name (yet? who knows?) but has some television acting, writing and directing credits. Suncoast is her first feature film, and it is partly autobiographical, based on her experience 20 or so years ago as a teenager, when she helped her mother care for a brother who was dying of brain cancer.
The film is dedicated to her brother. The lessons learned are wholesome. The feelings are heartfelt ... maybe too much so; it seemed a bit on the nose to me, but given the theme and the autobiographical nature of the movie, it would be churlish to get too snarky.
I wasn’t aware of this one. Thanks to E. Pluribus Unum for flagging it.
Absolutely agree.
Thanks for the recommendation. Great actors too.
Jeb! is not in it. The Terri Schiavo case is running in the background but is not extensively developed. I thought they could’ve and should’ve done a bit more with it, but nobody asked me.
The movie is partly/largely? autobiographical. Laura Chinn is of mixed race (like the girl in the movie) and her parents were divorced. (In the movie, the girl’s father had died.) Her Wikipedia page doesn’t give many details, but it looks like she split time between her father and her mother, who lived in Clearwater, Florida.
It is easy to speculate that the Terri Schiavo case running in the background was part of the soundtrack of her own life and that the characters in the movie and their reactions to the Schiavo case (only touched in passing) are also drawn from life. There is some thematic overlap but it is not perfect; the brother in the film dies of natural causes while Terri Schiavo was deliberately euthanized. Apples and oranges, but the film doesn’t explore those differences.
“ Suncoast is the hospice facility where Terri Schiavo died.”
Where she was murdered by being starved to death.
Exactly
Thanks for the ping.
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