Word: ava
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Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) is an energetic, itinerant Southern woman; she's been married three times, and when her relationships end, she simply packs up moves herself and her daughter elsewhere. Twelve-year-old Ava is less than thrilled when her mom plucks her from life in West Virginia and takes her across the country to Starlight Beach, Calif.; Ava wants a real home and stability, and for her mom to meet the right man and finally settle down. Mary Jo moves herself and Ava in with Jack (Gavin O'Connor), a seemingly nice trucker; Ava makes friends...
Meantime, down the coast, near San Diego, Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her daughter Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), having survived a more problematical journey west, struggle much more realistically for survival in Tumbleweeds. Mary Jo is fleeing an abusive marriage (her fourth), but can't quite escape her taste for sexy, damaged guys. In a film that moves with an easy, unforced pace, she settles in with a truck driver (played by director and co-writer Gavin O'Connor) who's good in bed but damply insistent on clockwork routine outside it. She has a job that matches...
...Ava keeps mice, plays Romeo (that's not a misprint) in the school play, and though occasionally exasperated by her mother, adores her funky, spunky spirit. As do we, for McTeer, the English actress who stunned Broadway in A Doll's House two seasons back, is a wonder--sweet and fierce, a creature of good instincts and bad (but reparable) judgments. She's probably never going to get anywhere very grand, but she's going to get there intact. You suspect her child--her only true love--may do better than that. Meantime, we have this movie--full of acceptant...
...hard times, she sold off her real estate, stocks and jewelry to keep his creditors at bay. There was the scandal of Charlie Chaplin, who married the very young Oona O'Neill and actually got to live happily ever after with her. And of course Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, battling and drinking in their epic '50s melodrama. Ernest Hemingway said all great love affairs end in tragedy: either disillusion sets in and people "settle" or separate, or one member of the affair dies, leaving the other alone. By that reckoning, all romances are equal, the more famous ones...
Then, unexpectedly, he struck out when he proposed an implausible, three-chain helix for DNA. Several months later, in Cambridge, England, Francis Crick and I, apprehensive that Linus might bat again, found the double helix. Why Linus failed to hit this home run will never be known. His wife Ava Helen is said to have told Linus that he should have worked harder. I believe the decade following World War II may have had too many agonizing moments for the Pauling family...