Stockholm, Pennsylvania movie storyline. Seventeen years after she was abducted by a stranger named Benjamin McKay (Jason Isaacs), twenty-three-year-old Leanne Dargon (Saoirse Ronan), who has been in his captivity all this time, is discovered, and eventually reunited with her biological parents, Marcy (Cynthia Nixon) and Glen Dargon (David Warshofsky), while Ben is now in prison charged with her kidnapping.
Ben was able to hide her locked in his basement all of this time, telling her that he saved her from world destruction, which she would have no reason not to believe. Leanne has no true recollection of her time before Ben, who renamed her “Leia”, and thus is the only family she has ever known. Over those seventeen years, Marcy and Glen dealt with the abduction in different ways, Marcy, whose primary focus was and still is Leanne, to the point of never having returned to work. Marcy, Glen, and Leia enter into their reunion with this history.
So while Marcy and Glen have a memory of their six-year-old daughter who they want back in a young adult form, Leia only sees in front of her two strangers. Their parent/offspring relationship is thus formal and strained at best. But it takes a turn when Marcy discovers just how much of an attachment Leia still has to Ben, who Marcy only sees as the man who destroyed their family. Marcy goes to extreme measures to get back the “Leanne” she so desperately wants, at the possible expense of everything else in her life.
Stockholm, Pennsylvania is a 2015 drama film directed by Nikole Beckwith, as her directorial and film-writing debut. The film premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The screenplay was awarded the 2012 Nicholl Fellowship from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
It was produced by Greg Ammon, Leslie Urdang and Dan Halsted with the studio Fido Features. The film was acquired by Lifetime on March 26, 2015, and made its television premiere on May 2, 2015.[3] The film is edited by Joe Klotz.
Film Review for Stockholm, Pennsylvania
o they give out awards for the first half of movies? If so, Stockholm, Pennsylvania deserves them all. Leanne (Saoirsie Ronan), a woman in her early 20s, returns to her parents (Cynthia Nixon and David Warshofsky) 16 years after she was kidnapped by a man and raised in isolation in his basement. We see this brilliantly: Nikole Beckwith’s film starts out a slow and subtle meditation on what it’s like to have everything familiar ripped away from you. How the modern world is weird and cruel when you know of no alternative.
Nixon is superb as Marcy, a woman who doesn’t know how to love this strange adult who has arrived in her home with a different name, a different birthday, and no attachment to her at all. Both women are trying to cope after their lives were frozen by one horrible moment, and neither know how to get help doing it. The premise is ripped from the headlines; the treatment is delicate and astute.
Then we take a turn. Stockholm, Pennsylvania veers into movie-of-the-week melodrama and never finds its way safely back to shore. Marcy becomes increasingly possessive of Leanne and she tries to impose love on her daughter first with self-help techniques and then with force. It leads up to a conclusion that is laughably bad and completely unbelievable, smashing the groundwork laid in the first act.
First time writer and director Beckwith is one to watch, however. The performances she elicits are phenomenal, and the crispness of her staging visual as well as psychological. She can make an all-pink little girl’s room resemble a prison and a woman feeling rain for the first time look like a revelation and a fright. So it’s unfortunate she feels the need to ratchet up the drama to such a fever pitch. Or perhaps she felt there needed to be some hook, some new way to tell a story that has become sadly familiar tabloid fodder. The substance was always there, she just got distracted by all the flash. With a bit more maturity and confidence in her vision, Beckwith is sure to come up with something that’s a knockout all the way through.
Stockholm, Pennsylvania (2015)
Directed by: Nikole Beckwith
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Hana Hayes, Cynthia Nixon, Avery Phillips, David Warshofsky, Jason Isaacs, Rosalind Chao, Tom Wright, Jayne Taini, Juan M. Fernández, Michelle Alegria, Gordon Greene
Screenplay by: Nikole Beckwith
Production Design by: Kathrin Eder
Cinematography by: Arnaud Potier
Film Editing by: Joe Klotz
Costume Design by: Emily Batson
Set Decoration by: Lisa Son
Art Direction by: Dane Michael Jensen, Chloe Knapp
Music by: Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, Brian McOmber
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Lifetime
Release Date: January 23, 2015 (Sundance), May 2, 2015 (United States)
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