In Review: 'Joy Ride,' 'Earth Mama'

A raunchy, carefree comedy and a somber, burdened drama highlight a characteristically low-key post-July 4th weekend.

Joy Ride
Dir. Adele Lim
95 min.

Joy Ride reaches a climax about halfway through its running time. More accurately, it reaches several climaxes at once via a raucous, frantically edited montage of its protagonists’ various sexual adventures while staying at a Chinese hotel— one involving exercise equipment, another involving a spirited threesome, and a third featuring retired NBA star Baron Davis. It’s a fun sequence, but not a particularly shocking one, since by that point moviegoers watching Adele Lim’s directorial debut will have witnessed scenes featuring projectile vomiting, panicked drug consumption, and graphic talk about how best to remove objects lodged into body cavities. Lim wastes no time establishing just how unapologetically raunchy her film will be, all but inviting anyone not on board to bail before it’s too late. Those who stick around, however, will find its shocks are (mostly) purposeful, serving a story of female friendship and personal identity played by a winning and game foursome.

Opening in a small, almost entirely white community in the Pacific Northwest, Joy Ride begins with the first meeting between Audrey, a daughter adopted from China by white parents, and Lolo, the daughter of first-generation immigrants who own a Chinese restaurant. After a childhood highlight reel, we catch up with the friends in adulthood, where the overachieving Audrey (Ashley Park) has become a lawyer and Lolo (Sherry Cola) an aspiring creator of erotic art who lives in Audrey’s garage. When Audrey’s boss (Timothy Simons), a man with a suspicious need to remind Audrey he’s an ally several times per conversation, sends her to China, Lolo decides to tag along and act as a translator.

Along the way, they pick up Lolo’s cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), a socially awkward K-Pop obsessive and, after arriving in China, add Kat (Stephanie Hsu), Audrey’s college roommate, now a famous actress in a relationship with a fiancé whose commitment to chastity contrasts sharply with Kat’s wild past. A series of convoluted circumstances send all four in search of Audrey’s biological mother, during which shenanigans ensue at every stop.

Working from a script by Cherry T. Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao (both Family Guy veterans), Lim puts a lot of faith in her cast to find the heart beneath the crassness without losing the comedy. It’s well-placed. Characters that could have been one-dimensional types — The Weird One, The Horny One, etc. — pick up complexity as the film goes along and the bonds between the quartet deepen. Joy Ride sometimes raises questions it doesn’t have the ability to answer, particularly as Audrey gets closer to reaching her birth mother, but that might be apt. The film treats identity as a shifting and nebulous concept that resists easy definition. Can Kat reinvent herself as a devout Christian through force of will? Do the friends Deadeye has made online count in the real world? Why does Audrey, after others have defined her by other Asian heritage her entire life, feel so alienated in Asia itself? There’s not always enough space between the gags to give such concerns proper consideration, but that doesn’t make them any less present. The film leads with laughs and body fluids, but it has considerably more on its mind. —Keith Phipps

Joy Ride opens in theaters everywhere tomorrow.

Earth Mama
Dir. Savanah Leaf
97 min.

Throughout Savanah Leaf’s debut feature Earth Mama, a succession of young Black mothers stand up and testify in front of an old BINGO display board at what looks like a church basement or community center. Their stories are full of anger and heartbreak over the children they’ve lost to the system and resolve about getting them back, but to call these sessions a “support group” falls just short of reality. Their participation is mandated and monitored, part of the byzantine and sometimes arbitrary process of determining their fitness for motherhood. When the film’s protagonist, 24-year-old Gia (Tia Nomore), balks at the opportunity to share her thoughts, she’s quietly rebuked for it. If she wants to take custody of her two kids again—or keep the third one that’s just about to drop—then she’ll have to perform for it. 

These scenes are crucial to understanding the film’s two-pronged approach to telling Gia’s story, as well as the stories of women like her. Earth Mama believes strongly in the solidarity between Black mothers caught in the system and the multigenerational continuity that leads them (and led their mothers and grandmothers) to tragic outcomes. Gia may be the central figure here, but Leaf, expanding on “The Heart Still Hums,” the black-and-white short she made with Taylor Russell, keeps an eye toward the bigger picture. Gia’s circumstances may be unique in the finer print, but she represents a shared plight that Leaf insists must be acknowledged, too, which makes this an unusual piece of work—more Daughters of the Dust than standard-issue social drama. 

Set in a Bay Area community—Leaf reportedly consulted Sorry to Bother You director Boots Riley but this vibes more with Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco—Earth Mama introduces Gia trying to buy three cheap mood rings from a department store with her debit card. The card is declined for the full amount, so she pays half in cash, just so she’ll have something she and her two kids in foster care can share. (The initial mood readings are predictably bleak.) She only has limited, supervised visits and her efforts toward expanded visits and eventual custody are thwarted by money problems. She works part time as a photography assistant at a portrait studio and her hours are limited by state-mandated classes—which, in turn, keep her from tending to a living space that will pass muster with Child Protective Services.

Earth Mama does not paint Gia as a perfect person by any means, but it does reveal how narrow her choices are when she’s trapped by poverty and a system that can’t give her a feasible pathway out. Her uncertainty extends to her children, who wildly diverge in their connection to her, but the most touching subplot of Earth Mama rests on the fate of her unborn child, who she considers putting up for adoption. Finding the right family for that baby proves to be easy, which makes the negotiation of her parental rights that much harder. “I’ll always be their mama” is a refrain that gets said several different ways and several different characters in the film, but that’s the only certainty these mothers can cling to. The rest is up for grabs. — Scott Tobias 

Earth Mama opens in limited release on 7/14.