Mark Reviews Movies: WEST OF SUNSHINE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 24, 2019

There's less a sense of desperation within Jim (Damian Hill), the protagonist of West of Sunshine, and more a sense depressing acceptance. His story is one that has been told across countless thrillers, and even though writer/director Jason Raftopoulos' feature debut seems as if it might play out in such a mode, the film instead takes the character and his situation as an opportunity to study how a loser convinces himself to keep on losing.

Jim is a courier for a small delivery company, and at the film's start, he is late for work, has forgotten that his son Alex (Ty Perham) is spending the day with him, and owes thousands of dollars to a loan shark named Banos (Tony Nikolakopoulos)—due by the end of the day. He doesn't have the money, but Jim has a plan.

The plan is to bet on a sure thing in a particular horse race that afternoon. The film informs us, through a brief scene with Jim's ex-wife (played by Faye Smythe), that Jim has a long history of financial troubles—failing to pay child support, spending a lot of money maintaining his deceased father's classic car (The old man had similar troubles, and the car serves as an understated metaphor for that cycle), and, naturally, gambling away the rest of his money.

A desperate man might do almost anything to get out of trouble with a man like Banos, who doesn't need to threaten a guy like Jim, because the threat is implicit. Jim, though, simply falls back on the only way of making money—and losing it, although a guy like Jim conveniently forgets that part—that he knows. He's resigned to this life of scraping by day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute. If he ever could have been a desperate man, that spark has gone out within Jim well before Raftopoulos' story begins.

The film is wise about Jim, played with a kind of frustrated but sad complacency by Hill, because it knows that no luck, no scheme, and no foray into dealing illegal drugs (all with his son in tow) is going to solve his biggest problem. West of Sunshine is about Jim figuring out that problem, and the drama isn't in the debt or the potential violence. It's in wondering if it's too late for a guy like Jim.

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