Alison Lohman’s Angela brings novel heart into the film, while raising the question of dual loyalties and stark betrayal
[Spoiler alert: For those who care, because of the type of part Angela plays, and because of how well Lohman performs this role, I should look at this character in some detail through the story’s arc. Unfortunately, I have to give away something of the surprise ending to explain what I need to, including how well, overall, the film works (and in some measure doesn’t work well enough), and how important the Angela angle is. Edit done 3/16/13.]
Subsections here:
Roy and Angela’s relationship as the most winning one of the film, and the biggest story-development challenge
Lohman’s personality style does double-duty
Lohman’s appeal as an actress
The questionable allegation about Lohman’s being treated long-term for ADHD
The credibility of Angela’s character, apart from Lohman’s performance
At a local park, Roy Waller first meets the person his new psychiatrist has told him is the daughter whom he never met, Angela—as Roy
Then, with the advent of Angela’s importunate visit one evening and her needing to stay over at Roy’s house because of what she claims was a fight with her mother, Angela more broadly adds a particularly interesting dimension to this story—and the one that perhaps makes this movie appeal to people the most, up to a point, though it also is the basis for what makes this movie’s overall story arc problematic.
When I first saw this movie in September 2003, I was impressed enough by it to see it again shortly afterward. I think I wanted to see how well the con was played in the movie as a con, as to allow the later surprise ending, which I think is the main thing that has turned some viewers off this movie over the years. This sort of rechecking is what you might do with Hitchcock’s masterful Vertigo, but there the layers of meaning and double-dealing have to do with romantic emotions woven in amid the more intrigue-type goings-on, and everything in Vertigo is written so very carefully. With Matchstick, on the other hand, where the writing can sometimes be quite casual, you figure that, in a movie about obvious con men, the richness of the performance has to do, in part, with actors playing at being actors; and we might try to measure their more ostensible non-conning modes against their conning modes. And in a particular case (such as Angela) you may ask, how well was this done?
Well, whatever I found on second viewing in 2003, I would later see this movie several times more over several years, because of its entertainment value. But I think what really draws me back to it is not quite the issue of the tensions between the conning-versus-non-conning modes I just mentioned, but the complexity of style it has, the way it renders the flashing variety of the “surfaces” of American life without being chaotic or pretentious. There is something quite artful about the intricacy of everyday life within this movie. But then, looking again at the character issue, the question arises, is the movie really a triumph of stylistic use of detail over the substance of a dramatic arc that we can believe in?
Roy and Angela’s relationship as the most winning one of the film, and the biggest story-development challenge
I think the main basis for answering this lies in the relationship between Roy and Angela. Now, the con man shenanigans may or may not get old—they’re amusing in the short term, but con games might not be what we might return to a movie repeatedly for. Here, a kind of love relationship carries the main moral heft of this movie, and probably the actor who has the biggest task to make it work is Alison Lohman.
The awkwardness of how the story was developed, as I only hinted at in Part 1 (my second July 31 entry), makes you think it was a minor miracle that Lohman could pull off a character portrayal that perhaps is the crucial one to anchor a lot of viewers’ emotional investment in this film. Ted Griffin, one of the film’s screenwriters (along with his brother Nicholas), and also one of the producers, wanted to deviate from the book in eliminating the twist ending, and his first draft really had Angela as Roy’s daughter. Robert Zemeckis, one of the producers, early on wanted the twist ending putting in. The writers then came up with the film’s coda, which came after the reinstated twist ending, which paid respect to the audience’s investment in the relationship between Angela and Roy.
Further complicating matters is that director Ridley Scott and composer Hans Zimmer, who wrote the well-crafted, if busily varying, score, thought the film was primarily comedy, but Ted Griffin and another producer, Sean Bailey, though the film should be primarily a character study, and on the dark side. Overall, we can see that “many cooks” of different schools of thought were involved in the making of this broth, and the fact that the coda was changed a bit with a late reshoot of a few lines shows how the nature of the story was not entirely set for so long—which might make you think there’s something incoherent about it, or not well enough formed. I think the film ends up, as it seemed to me pretty much from the beginning, to be complex in how it varies flexibly in aiming toward, at times, (1) a comedic approach regarding Roy, and at other times (2) a sympathetic respect for the Roy/Angela story, and at other times (3) more darkish-hued suspense in the “long con” part. Probably some viewers like the con game aspect more, others the family-drama aspect more.
Probably what would disappoint people the most, in terms of judging the characters, is how the plot twist toward the end involves Angela—the fact that it includes her at all—and this might disappoint not just the family-drama partisans.
For her part, Lohman has the task of playing someone who seems 14—which in itself is not hard for her—who is really a little older than that. And while Roy and Frank show their “professional stuff” by “acting a part” as con men sometimes, Lohman’s Angela doesn’t really appear as a con woman acting somewhat artificially (as a 14-year-old) with Roy; she really seems a charmer of a 14-year-old, if a somewhat tomboyish one. And this is not only well done but is, I think, the only way she could have played this role for 95 percent of her screen time.
Lohman’s personality style does double-duty
I’ve always found Lohman appealing. The two main movies I’ve seen her in (a few times each) are this one and White Oleander. I’ve also seen her in Drag Me to Hell (2009; I saw this twice, I think), to which I’ll return, but that is not the sort of film that would highlight an actor’s capacity to bring life to a story of emotional richness.
In both White Oleander and Matchstick—both, ironically, directed by Britons—Lohman plays characters who are different ages at different times. In the former, she is a young daughter, Astrid, of a licentious, charismatic woman who is an artist, and due to her family/home circumstances, she becomes increasingly embittered and jaded as she gets older, eventually ending up as a Goth girl who toughmindedly confronts her mother when visiting her in prison. Later she resolves her own wounded bitterness to some extent. Lohman seems credible at all ages of Astrid she plays.
In general, Lohman can be girlish at times—befitting an upscale sort that she apparently is—and at other times can be earthy/testy, though this later personality style seems in the watered-down way of an upscale young woman.
In Matchstick, by far the most time she spends in the movie, she is acting the part of a 14-year-old girl. Yet she is supposed to be someone in her twenties pretending to be 14. As it happens, during most of the filming Lohman was 22 (she had her 23rd birthday during production), and yet she seems convincing as 14. (A spoiler follows through the rest of this subsection.) In a late scene in the movie, when Roy
This wordless moment is one of the few excellently done dramatic moments in the film, serving as a final sequence that restores some amount of moral balance to the story, particularly in giving respect to the charming relationship “14-year-old” Angela had had with Roy
Lohman’s pulling off her part in the late scene goes about as well as can be expected given the writing. Her wistfully getting some accord with Roy on the fact that “We had fun, didn’t we?” seems to reflect a shallow way either character could have come to moral terms with where their relationship stood; but this movie is about con people, and in some ways its screenwriting (not least, here) seems not well enough thought through. But to the extent that either character shows that it tries to aim toward an honest and loving life, the actors—Cage as well as Lohman—seem to do well enough in performances that seemed aimed to be, and were confined to be, spontaneous.
On another level, you could say that we can find Lohman appealing enough as “the actress behind the role”—to the extent we confuse the actress with Angela—but we still might find Angela the character, as more abstractly considered, to be an undesirable to have participated in the con on Roy that she has, even it it was the only one she has taken part in, as she tells Roy.
Lohman’s appeal as an actress
Though Lohman has struck me as fairly consistent (not oversimplifying) in the flavor of overall personality she projects—compare her turn in Drag Me to Hell with her 2002 and 2003 roles—you would still call her a talented actress, unlike, say, Jessica Alba, whom I saw in the darkly amusing Machete (2010), who seems like nothing so much as a nice young woman and not an actress. [An End note can help support this, but is deferred for now.] Lohman has long seemed to me intelligent, sensitive, and—if you want to call this a fault—seemingly “too nice” in a way. She is able to play “dark” in moments, too. She could play bitchy moments in Oleander, and cry floridly enough, with dramatic taste, as a young girl in Matchstick. She can, at times, have a certain earthiness of expression about her. Girls younger than her age, obviously, she can do. Meanwhile, more generally, she seems to have a refinement of an upper-middle-class sort, but still a sense for what gives a character some emotional body.
Her eyes—which Sam Raimi had remarked on (I believe in DVD commentary for Drag Me to Hell) being a distinguishing feature of her when he cast her in his 2009 horror film—have always struck me as “soulfully alert,” if that doesn’t sound corny. She is somewhat unusual, slightly exotic, in appearance in being a blonde with big dark eyes (and dark brows); but her eyes seem to show a center of interest, or a demanding-yet-fair quality; she isn’t simply a doll to more globally look at. On another level, even if she is tired, you could say, she is paying attention.
To round out my personal sketch, I’ll note that she has not appeared in a film since 2009, and is apparently raising a young family, according to her Wikipedia bio, and we would welcome seeing her back in starring roles when she is able.
The questionable allegation about Lohman’s being treated long-term for ADHD
There is a curious detail about Lohman that turned up recently on the Internet. If it is true, it complements the picture of her (in my view), and may help to explain some of her personality-flavor and maybe why she has appeared in a relatively limited range of roles. But there is a surprising lack of backup for this information.
Lohman’s Wikipedia biography, in a detail that I believe was only recently added, has been treated, apparently since childhood until now, for attention deficit disorder. The implication in the article is that once she was treated, she did very well in school in almost all her subjects (one in which she did not was drama!). The somewhat banal passage claiming this all is: “In her first school year, Lohman was diagnosed with combined type [sic] attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and put on [sic] medicine for it, which she still uses as an adult. Afterwards, she had straights A's in everything, except in drama, because she was too shy.” [Update 3/16/13: This allegation about her being treated for ADHD, and the supposed cited reference for this, were found to have been removed from this Wikipedia bio by 3/15/13. Comments on this remain here for pedagogical purposes regarding online remarks about psychological issues that are inadequately backed up.]
The only reference for this whole statement is a blog page (from “psychcentral”), of all things. The relevant part of this merely states her having gotten A’s in school and getting a C in drama…and the blog entry seems to link this to a more general theme of self-scrutiny amid certain kinds of brain processes. But nothing is said on this blog entry about ADHD, either in general or regarding Lohman.
When we look up other Internet sources on her, we find:
* A Yahoo biography, which makes no mention of her having been treated for ADHD;
* An article in Variety from 2003, which makes mention of her early drama experience but nothing about ADHD. Interestingly, the “psychcentral” blog site seems to reference this Variety article, but there is no live link; but when you check it out, this article backs up the school history in its way (with a quote from Lohman), but not at all the ADHD connection.
Meanwhile, when you Google “Alison Lohman ADHD” (as I did a few times through August 3), among other things, you can find:
* a Facebook general information page on her, which seems, from the initial link data shown on the Google results page, to include info on her having been treated for ADHD, but this is not shown on the Facebook page, as far as I can see (and what information it does have is indicated to have come from her Wikipedia bio); and
* Another site, which has chunky enough bio info, including the ADHD allegation (apparently gotten from the Wikipedia bio), but no direct backup for this. (Interestingly, on August 3, I found that someone had inserted the bracketed “citation needed” for this claim.)
The problem with a claim being entered on a Wikipedia page about some long-term psychological-health issue, even if it is about the “less scary” long-term problem of ADHD (less scary than, say, bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder), is that if it isn’t documented, you ask, who put it there? If it wasn’t, in this case, by someone close to Lohman, by whom, then? Was it someone with a bitterly competitive attitude toward her? Such as a former classmate who thought, “She started getting treated for ADHD, then did well in school, but she couldn’t act at the time. Then she became a recognized movie actress, and was still on ADHD meds. She’s almost a fraud!” The unacceptability of this is obvious. For any person, in fact, whether famous or not, if health matters of a long-term nature are stated on the Internet, at least some indication of the source would be required.
So I have serious doubts about the substantiation of the allegation of Lohman being treated for ADHD. Until and unless I find it, I leave this information here as a curious allegation online, but probably to be ignored in my—or anyone else’s—larger appreciative look at Lohman.
The credibility of Angela’s character, apart from Lohman’s performance
Though in the coda the movie makes a valiant attempt to respect what it set up with Roy
First, by her look and some of her behavior, while Angela the 14-year-old seems to come from a less-than-upper-middle-class background, and has some earthiness about her (and maybe has learned a few tough lessons from hard knocks), there is still something sweet, trusting, and on the naïve side about her. But she’s a con artist, you say. OK, even if you look at the Angela in the carpet store at the end of the movie, and you consider she is cultivating a long-term relationship with an apparent slacker boyfriend seemingly on the main basis of that he is “sweet” to her, you still get the sense that this is not such a “skeevy” young woman that she was making the rounds of truck stops, or the like. That kind of girl would probably be a druggie, and have a personality disorder to boot. She would have a look about her, leaking around the “nice girl” act, of a kind of “dirtbag.” And more fundamentally, if a young woman like Angela—whether 22 or 14—should get involved in such an elaborate con as Frank is leading, wouldn’t you expect her to really be a hardened crook who showed her grim, hard-to-reform sociopathic side in the chinks of her 14-year-old act, especially to a presumably canny type like Roy Waller?
You would. And you realize that on a surface level, and perhaps despite what the screenwriters were thinking of what to do with her, this Angela seems a lot more like a relatively upscale sort, maybe in a phase of her young life of being “mixed up,” where she thinks all she’s good for is being a grifter, but she’s made of better stuff. Hence—as we know, from the coda—Frank (one of the masters among the con men) ends up gypping her out of her cut. So Angela is closer to the real Alison Lohman than to the truck-stop-hopping gamin Ridley Scott outlines.
