Two Yellow Lines (2021) Film Review
We have seen this story before.
Estranged father with a traumatic past wants to regenerate the relationship with his daughter after spending a couple of days with her. Of course, before this, we get the typical rejection from each of them during the beginning of a necessary encounter.
However, in Hollywood’s formula infested industry, this can’t seem like something bad. After all, all stories have been told. We can’t judge if a film’s plot has already been approached in the past.
Films like Two Yellow Lines exist because of a personal decision to tell a specific story whose human elements are similar to those we’ve seen before. The variant in the equation is simple to identify: For a film like this, you need good performances. Characters that connect instantly with the viewer and make them forget anything they could have seen before.
And Two Yellow Lines is a curious and lightweight approach that manages to get to its ending with a monotonous tone that plays like a safety net for the story. It’s far from being a bad film. It just plays like a naive option in a territory filled with filmmakers who play the risky card with a lot of trust in themselves.
This road movie tells the story of Jack, a former smokejumper who has retired after a fateful event in which he lost part of his team. His current life is more peaceful, but demons from the past haven’t left him.
One day he receives a call. His former partner asks him to pick up their daughter from camp. He hesitates at first, but he has no other choice. He must leave work to pick up his daughter, who he hasn’t seen in more than five years. But she isn’t the girl he once knew. She grew up, and so did her anger for him abandoning the family.
A road trip in a motorcycle becomes a life changing experience for both, as they must encounter a middle point in the mystery of the estrangement. It won’t be easy for her. But for him it’s almost torture to open up to someone he doesn’t know but loves unconditionally.
Along with an impressive soundtrack, Two Yellow Lines plays like a feelgood film that conserves its innocence without being cheesy at all. Both leads are very well directed in a film that doesn’t require much of their dramatic talent but needs authenticity in the characters they both portray. The script is enough for them to develop their characters and make us believe in their conflicts even if we don’t agree with what they say at all times.
Perhaps the film falls short in depicting a climactic moment in the main conflict. It’s what we expected. And a dangerous situation isn’t enough as it insists on making a character seem ridiculous. But what do I know. Two Yellow Lines has so much of an autobiographical sense that maybe this is what happened and it feels bland in the context.
At the end, Two Yellow Lines achieves its purpose without effort. It’s a film that speaks about trauma in a very secure environment and makes us believe a silent character with a past that engulfs him in his nightmares. His relationship with his daughter is just an opportunity for him to cure a disease he can’t understand. A disease that’s far more present than we thought.
