You could have knocked me over with a sparkly vampire when the end credits of the new film Prisoner’s Daughter revealed that the director was Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Twilight), a hit-and-miss filmmaker to be sure, but one whom I’m always rooting for because she’s seems supremely cool. I realize, that’s not a lot to hang one’s hat on, but she's always struck me as a talented filmmaker in search of a decent screenplay that often seems to elude her. However, Prisoner’s Daughter is a film made interesting and watchable because of the way Hardwicke handles and guides her talented cast through a family drama that incorporates messages about bullying, domestic abuse, and the perils of being single mother.
Brian Cox plays Max, a prisoner 12 years into his sentence who has just found out he has terminal cancer, with only a few months to live. The warden gives Max the opportunity to live out his remaining time on earth out in the real world, if he can get someone to stay with him. He turns to the only person who might want to spend a little time with him: his estranged daughter Maxine (Kate Beckinsale), who lives with her teen son Ezra (Christopher Convery) and is struggling to pay bills. On top of that, Ezra is being picked on by boys at school, and even when he does nothing to fight back, he gets in trouble and is in danger of getting kicked out.
After initially rejecting the idea of Max moving in with them, Maxine decides her father can live with them if he pays rent and buys his own food. But he also makes for a great influence on his grandson (who he’s not allowed to tell he’s his grandson; I’m not quite sure why Maxine comes up with this rule), even teaching Ezra how to defend himself from punches and eventually fight back. He gets a bit of help from Max’s old prison buddy (Ernie Hudson), who now owns a boxing gym. Also popping his disruptive head in is Ezra’s father, Tyler (Tyson Ritter), an abusive, addict musician, who keeps making a scene when Maxine berates him for showing up unannounced.
The lessons learned in Prisoner’s Daughter basically boil down to Max trying to make good by his daughte. After being in and out of prisons for so long, he was never able to contribute to her upbringing at all, not even when his wife/her mother got sick. The other lesson has to do with Maxine trying to pull her life together enough to raise her son right and protect him from his bad-news father, who, at one point, breaks into their house to simply take the boy. There aren’t a great number of surprises as the plot unspools, but Cox and Beckinsale are so strong here, they elevate the material enough to make things impactful within the turbulence. Everyone must come to terms with the darker side of their past before they can heal, move on, and reconnect, and while most of the major beats of the story are fairly easy to predict, the performances and Hardwicke’s capable direction pull it all together enough to make something of substance, albeit a bit ragged around the edges.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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