Gaffigan, Davis and Grace Resplendent in ‘Troop Zero’
She’s not Dorothy. She’s nowhere near Oz. And, she wears red, plastic boots instead of bedazzled slippers. One more thing: Christmas Flint is also a greater heroine.
I resist writing movie reviews–of even a brief kind; namely because we all know what we tend to do with such recommendations–forget about them moments after they’re uttered. But I also can’t resist persuading people to check this one out–especially if you have kids, miss movies with actual points, and have Amazon Prime, of course.
The scene is 1977, rural, Wiggly, Georgia. That is not a capitalization error–the town is Wiggly, GA; not an adjective but proper noun. Still, the adjective stands as a fit descriptor for the characters in the town. Wiggly as in “different”.
Christmas (played by the ingenious McKenna Grace) introduces the town and its characters. Chief among them is Christmas’s dad, lovable-loser country lawyer, the “Boss Man” (portrayed by the affable yet deep Jim Gaffigan) and his sidekick paralegal, Viola Davis’s Rayleen. Davis’s performance is so convincing, real, comic and at times, grave that she takes over the film–in a good way actually. She’s the smart, capable, sublime legal mind of a whole town that is both her birthplace and her trap.
Christmas’s dreams far surpass those of Rayleen in that the world does not seem able to hold them. She desires to go to space, discover and communicate with alien life forms. And that dream never dies but it becomes coupled with an equal fascination with terrestrial bodies, the stars around her; those equally vibrant and ready to supernova, especially her assembled friends in Georgia Birdie (read Girl Scout) Troop Zero–it was the last number left. Even the straight-shooting Rayleen can’t help but be inspired as Troop Zero Mother.
It is a fun movie. Beyond that, as the audience sees Christmas reaching for stars only to become grounded in the best sense of the term, we celebrate with her and the rest of the troop.
They are not zeroes in the end. No one is.
