Gimme Shelter highlights just how difficult it is to genuinely ask for help. Not just a twenty for gas or some friendly advice, but to ask for real change-your-life kind of help.
Some might say it is pride that makes it difficult. But the more complex answer is at the harsh heart of Ron Krauss’s film Gimme Shelter, based on the true story of a teenage girl scrambling to change her circumstances in an unyielding world.
The documentary feel and forthright performances steady the film on its fixed path to comeuppance, but it never really attempts to push it to the limit, inevitably leaving the tone sometimes boring or preachy.
Still, the main character Agnes ‘Apple’ Bailey, played by Vanessa Hudgens,—a young female of lower-class—is one we don’t often get the chance to peel back the layers to in a feature film.
From the moment the film begins, all that can be heard is Apple’s trembling words, “I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid,” repeated again and again. The hushed litany immediately plunges viewers into a state of unknowable fear that is all but tangible. But what is there to fear?
The facts are laid out by Apple herself: she’s been abandoned, lied to, lied about, moved in and out of countless shelters and foster homes, sexually and mentally abused—and she’s only 16.
It’s a laundry list of just how terribly the system has failed her.
Discovering the totality of her struggle is enough to make one believe Apple would be worn-down and broken, drained of any hope or will power. But this is not the case. If anything, Gimme Shelter is a testament to the force and relentlessness of Apple’s will.
She escapes the tumultuous and drugged-out lifestyle surrounding her mother, played by Rosario Dawson. She taxis, walks, and buses all the way to New Jersey—in pursuit of the father who abandoned her and the possibility that he might help.
Years of mistrusting everyone who was supposedly there to aid her, though, forces Apple to bristle under the idea of asking for anything and hide beneath a tough cold attitude.
Yet still, she asks her father, played by Brendan Fraser,—who has a job on Wall Street, a wife and two kids, and essentially a perfect life—for shelter. She doesn’t ask for love or trust, just a place to stay.
To say the least, it’s the second time he monumentally lets her down.
The scenes at her father’s house are just a few of the more enervating incidents that tether us to Apple.
Her raw desolation is felt from the beginning. The flung insults of “whore” and “slut” from her mother are also etched in the mind, causing the audience to be bounded by Apple’s adapted mentality of holding everyone at arm’s length.
But when Tom sits there, spouting his Wall Street-conference-room-talk of respect and confidence, it makes you bleed for the girl with the seemingly automated android for a father.
And the bondage to Apple solidifies even more when we stand with her at a fork in the road, as she stares into the face of the biggest decision of her life: a child.
It is foreseeable, at this point, that some will break the link between themselves and Apple — they will look at her, just as Tom’s cold wife does, see her tattoos, her piercings, her lack of job and money, her lack of a home, and think, “There’s no way she’s going to make it.”
This is the clutch point of Gimme Shelter—either you are still with Apple and the struggle she faces or you’re just another person in her life that would expect her to not make anything of herself.
Hudgens’ startling performance exacts with care both the trepidation of the decision to be made and the resolve to not be like all the people who have been disappointments.
It’s fascinating and strange to know Hudgens is the same girl from High School Musical but this film, coupled with the gauntlet thrown down in Spring Breakers, should make everyone eye her with a little more deference.
The real display of acting here, though, is Dawson’s portrayal of the mother. There is a truly spell-binding scene where she begs for Apple to return home with her. She weeps that no one knows what she wanted from life, that no one cared and that she only ever wanted her baby with her.
And I believed in her, in that moment, as so did Apple; it was that hypnotic a plea. But the tremendous thing is that Apple never in the film allows herself to relapse back to what her life was in the foster care system.
She is an agent of her own fate—asking, begging, and taking when necessary—and it’s a shocking pleasure to see.
