Outside of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, has there ever been a really great film about a single mom and her only child moving across the country in search of a better life? The past couple of years have seen Anywhere But Here, Tumbleweeds, and now writer-director Enid Zentelis' debut feature Evergreen—all sincere, low-boil melodramas, and all fairly stingless. Of the three, Evergreen comes in third, though Zentelis gets a good performance out of her lead, Addie Land, who plays a teenage girl embarrassed by her cosmetics-saleswoman mother, Cara Seymour.
Land's character's name—"Henri," short for "Henrietta"—#151;says a lot about who she's supposed to be, as do comments like "I don't do good on teams." She and Seymour land in a small Northwestern town defined by its Indian casinos and drive-through coffee kiosks, where everybody asks for chocolate sprinkles on their double espressos. The townsfolk may as well be wearing nametags labeled "stubborn" or "provincial" or "condescending." Land begins dating local rich kid Noah Fleiss, who seems to represent the life she and her mom want to live, but when Fleiss tries to push her into having sex by trotting out the old "blue balls can make a guy really sick" routine, Land dimly ignores what everyone in the theater can see.
Evergreen suffers from creeping indie-itis, epitomized by the low-light digital video and droning electric-guitar soundtrack, but its biggest weakness lies in Zentelis' apparent fear of surprise. She tiptoes up to some nice moments, like when Seymour marvels out loud at her beautiful daughter, and then stumbles by having Seymour say, in her best yokel voice, "Someday you could manage a fancy department store." It's not a bad idea to have mother and daughter eat at Wendy's after spending an afternoon at a museum, but not to have them say that that's what they're going to do, so that the audience can wince at their pedestrian tastes. In Evergreen's best scene, Fleiss' patronizing socialite mother Mary Kay Place buys Land a makeover from Seymour, unaware that she's Land's mom. When the girl comes out of the procedure looking like a white-trash vision of glamour, the unfussy visual depiction of how a parent's expectations can stain a child says more than Evergreen's loaded dialogue and forced plot ever could.