Film Review: Go For Sisters
| Author | Mike Nellis |
| Pages | 73-75 |
73
FILM REVIEW
Mike Nellis, Law School, University of Strathclyde
GO FOR SISTERS (2013)
Written, directed and produced by John Sayles, 123min
There are not that many good movies about American parole officers, (or their British
equivalents for that matter), but John Sayles' new film, Go for Sisters – which received its
UK premier at the Glasgow Film Festival in February 2014 – mak es up for th e absence
(Nellis 2009; 2012). True, it is not about a parole officer’s ordinary, day to day office
routine, any more than previous parole movies have been - only the opening sequence, in
which a young female parolee tries forlornly to explain that it was a kindness for a friend
which led her to break the rules of her licence - gives a flavour of that, but its plot is driven
by an arrangement - a road trip with a p arolee, “out of state” - that only a parole officer
would be in a position to make.
At the heart of the film are two late thirties black women in Phoenix, Arizona, once school
friends, so close despite coming from quite different families that others said they could
“go for sisters”. They drifted apart after the good-looking, precocious one stole th e less
good-looking, more staid one’ s boyfriend. Staid Bernice Stokes becomes a hard-ass parole
officer, while p recocious Fontayne Gamble doe s drugs, does time and ends up on parole,
though not initially under Bernice. However, when Bernice's adult, e x-military, truck
driving son Rodney gets mixed up with bad guys and goe s missing, suspected of murdering
his friend, she enlists the aid of a reluctant Fonta yne and, through her, the people she
knew in her former life, to find him.
This is good set-up for a movie: a parolee who wants to g o straight and a parole officer
who needs to walk on the wild side. Beyond the opening sequence little is shown of the
kind of parole officer Bernice is, but one gets the impression that the job has instilled an
empathy deficit in her; she breaches the woman in the opening sequence, no questions
asked. Fon tayne, on the other hand, is shown struggling to go straigh t, holding down a
menial job in a café, resistin g temptation to start selling drugs again for a streetwise
charmer, tolerating his sneers when she refuses. Prison has left her somewhat bereft and
uncertain as to whether she can make a future for herself, and added to the hurdles she
already faced. A “gay-for-the-stay” relation ship with a fellow inmate has left her unsure of
her sexuality – but it is this fo rmer lover, no w married with a husband and baby – who
British Journal of Community Justice
©2014 Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield
ISSN 1475-0279
Vol. 12(1): 73-75
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