Sam Now (2022 | USA | 86 minutes | Reed Harkness)

Sam Now is unlike any other movie I’ve ever seen. 

Even though I am fast-developing a reputation as the easiest–to–cry member of the Seattle film press, I don’t think there’s anything I could’ve done to emotionally prepare for how powerful and quietly intense this movie is.

Sam is Sam Harkness, half-brother to self-taught director and narrator Reed Harkness. Sam and Reed often made Super 8 home movies together, often featuring the Blue Panther, an alter ego of the young Sam. Sam and Reed embark on a new adventure, to try to find Sam’s mother, who disappeared one day years before, in 2000, and hadn’t been heard from since. Reed and his brother Jared were in grade school at the time. Needless to say, their mother’s absence has taken a toll on the Harknesses in visible and invisible ways. Jared particularly was affected and saw a sudden drop in his grades. 

We learn early on that Sam’s mother Jois (pronounced “Joyce”) wasn’t kidnapped, having mental health problems, or in any danger, she was alive and well and just didn’t want to be contacted by her family ever again. They interview family members and friends to unlock the mystery that is Jois’s disappearance. One friend, a coworker at the upscale Ray’s Boathouse, described Jois as being a free spirit and someone who’d wear a floor-length gown to work. Jois’s mother is resigned to never seeing her daughter again.

The quest for Jois takes Reed and Sam to Long Beach to follow a tip that she ran away with a distinguished professor in Southern California. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the boys do actually find Jois. She’s living in Oregon and she’s receptive to reconnecting with her family.

Early in the movie, Sam makes clear he’s not interested in interrogating her mother for answers, but wants to let her know she’s missed and loved. That doesn’t mean that there’s no interest in having her account for the damage and chaos her disappearance caused. Many people are permanently affected by Jois’s vanishing. Sam even talks about developing barriers that keep people from getting too close to him and ending a relationship before it presents him an opportunity to get hurt again. 

Jois talks about her Japanese mother who abandoned her before her first birthday because it would be scandalous for a Japanese woman to have a half-white child. Jois is candid about her decisions and why she made them. She knows a lot of trauma and pain was caused in her absence and would prefer it not have occurred but remorseful or apologetic are adjectives no one would use to describe her. How much forgiveness and acceptance afforded Jois varies from family member to family member.

The movie is an emotional gut punch. There’s problems in every family, or so I have been telling myself ever since I saw my aunt and cousins on the “Dr. Phil” show a few weeks ago. It’s a feat of filmmaking that it is able to confront something that felt universal but also uniquely specific to this family. Sam Now is truly a remarkable piece of art that I won’t ever forget.

________________________________________

Sam Now plays at the Northwest Film Forum April 12 through April 16 and at the Grand Illusion on April 29 and April 30.