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SXSW live review: “Lebanon, PA”
“Lebanon, PA” is the anti-“Juno.”
Where “Juno” glided along with a host of Hollywood talent and a twee self-satisfaction, “Lebanon, PA” boasts three name actors and a host of unknowns examining a teen pregnancy through a very different cultural lens.
We first see Will (Josh Hopkins) storming out of an apartment after an apparent breakup, A 35-year-old Philadelphia ad man, we next see him discussing how to market to children — a brave choice for a guy we’re supposed to sympathize with.
Will returns to Lebanon, Pa. to bury his recently deceased father, a man he saw very little after his parents’ divorce. His mother Jeanette (Mary Beth Hurt) is eager for him to sell his father’s house.
While in Lebanon, Will meets Andy (Philadelphia stage vet Ian Merrill Peakes, holding down the folm’s most complicated character), a devoutly Catholic, single father of two. His life at loose ends, Will strikes up an odd friendship with Andy’s daughter CJ (Temple theater student Rachel Kitson making her film debut). He also starts hanging out with CJ’s married teacher Vicki (Samantha Mathis).
Democratic consultant James Carville, who helped the late Robert P. Casey to an unlikely win for Pennsylvania governor in 1986, once described the state as “Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, with Alabama in the middle.” It was a bit of a snide comment, but he had a point. Between the two cities, Pennsylvania is a very Catholic state. (Casey was famously pro-life.)
Writer, director and editor Ben Hickernell takes a look at this very conflict. Will is big-city, non-religious and interested in a (possibly unhappily) married woman. Andy has struggled as a single father as long as his younger child has been alive and find abortion unthinkable. CJ is in the middle, genuinely unsure of what to do as some adults tell her what to do and others refuse to help her make a choice.
Hickernell and most of the cast was present for a brief q-and-a, including Mathis, whom one woman was convinced she had seen on a soap opera. (No, ma’am, but have you seen “Pump Up the Volume?”)
Peakes discussed trying the make a man very unlike himself empathetic and noted that if people took the time to examine many sides of various important life choices rather than rushing into a decision, the world might be a slightly better place. Amen.
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