Director: Deborah Haywood
MPAA Rating: NR
Run Time: 82 Minutes
It is never an astonishing revelation to learn the lengths to which teenagers can be needlessly and creatively cruel to one another, and for its part, the quirky, mother-daughter, coming-of-age tragedy, Pin Cushion, treats its abundance of peer torturing with a blasé frankness.
Scrawny, red-headed teen Iona (Lily Newmark) and her hunchbacked, overweight mother Lynn (Joanna Scanlan) are the new residents of a dingy community, where social status goes a long way, and are painted from frame No. 1 as outcasts based on their gaudy fashion sense, closeness and their alien kindness. Moving into their tawdry, decrepit manor that is decorated as if a stack of Redbooks exploded all over the walls, the pair are set up for assured spectacular failure when it comes to the age-old dilemma of “fitting in,” and director Deborah Haywood is banking on your expectation of tragedy to beset these two.
While this marred the film into a predictable territory of bully dramas, the personable touch and subtle sympathy Pin Cushion can expend for its unfortunate souls, at the mercy of a hostile community that they desperately wish to join, allow the film to get at a level of uncomfortable pathos that takes a old of you.
The waif-like Iona and the dumpy, chipper Lynn are shown to be wholly dependent on one another when it comes to companionship, and this inscrutable closeness is at first amusing. The quirkiness of the two and their peculiar routines, such as referring to each other as Dafty and the garish ensembles they adorn (mostly hand-knitted by Lynn), suggests they had most likely isolated themselves for the entirety of Iona’s life.
Other than a blue budgie to smother with attention, Lynn and Iona are presented as akin to hermits who lack any sort of people skills and subsequently get mercilessly taken advantage of in a series of pitiable scenes.
When a neighbor comes over to borrow a ladder while Lynn is decorating her new home with a coat of bright, ugly pink, Lynn just hands it over to her, thinking she earned a friend, and is rebuked cruelly at every timid attempt she makes at getting it back. Iona, no more a social butterfly than her mother, gets preyed upon by a group of parasitic popular girls who instantly trick her into admitting she’s a slut on her first day. You can just read the pangs of uncontrollable social awkwardness and longing for acceptance in Newmark and Scanlan’s brilliantly understated performances as every attempt they make blows back into their faces.
Haywood seems to be suggesting that this trajectory into schoolyard victimhood is trait of hereditary and that the mousy Iona has no choice but to be labelled an outcast by her mother’s strange form of parenting that sees her daughter more as a best friend than anything else. Even as Iona seems to be flowering socially and the venomous popular girls (with names like Keeley and Stacie) bring her into their fold of makeup, boys and underage drinking, we know she was never given the social tools to navigate high-school cruelty, and her sudden acceptance is marked with assured cruel intentions.
The gradual drifting apart of the mother daughter pair touches a particularly sad note because Lynn is essentially confronted with what normalcy is by her own daughter and struggles to come to terms with this. In a particularly gutting scene, she puts on the appearance of going “normal” to her daughter and says she has a date, which, in reality, is her sitting on a park bench eating her own baked goods.
Having only each other for years did funny things to their ability to socialize, as it made Iona a completely trusting naif, so easy to take advantage of, and Lynn a doddering ball of anxieties who is even labelled too weird to join the community center’s friendship group. Haywood wrings these two unfortunates for all the piteousness they can muster, and it works for the most part.
Pin Cushion is comparable to dipping your toes into the waters of Todd Solondz in its display of preternatural lapses in human decency and empathy. While it never loses its quirky look and feel, as evidenced by Lynn’s crocheting of a frilly coffin for the unexpected death of her budgie when times are at their lowest, the film goes just dark enough in how it treats these two outcasts without completely bumming you out.
There is always a detectable appeal for sympathy from Haywood even as she turns Iona into a complete pariah and pushes Lynn to a psychotic break that manifests in some particularly dire, disturbing ways. There’s always a tenderness to how she shoots these two together that devilishly plays with your heartstrings even when you are certain tragedy is inevitable.
Their downfall and the manner in which it plays out is frankly predictable; you don’t need to be clairvoyant to know Iona’s sudden clout is conditional and temporary, but that is more the fault of the high-school bully genre than Haywood’s direction of it. Lynn and Iona are tragic figures who sadly would have lived their lives in careless bliss if they could subsist with only their own company, but that just isn’t how the world works.
If you fail your obligation as a parent to prepare your daughter for the outside world and can’t see past her as anything but your social crutch, then you have doomed yourself and her to ostracism once that world inevitably comes knocking. In a rote but well meaning way, Pin Cushion demonstrates this in its own heartrending way that really gets your empathy working overtime. It mostly succeeds because, despite us knowing where it is heading in how it piles on the misfortune, we never stop feeling and hoping for Iona and Lynn to find each other’s company once again.
