Writer/director Wayne Roberts debut feature 'Katie Says Goodbye' is rough, really too rough. Olivia Cook's performance as Katie is always sympathetic, she is sweet, but too sweet and the world eats her alive. That is the point I suppose, that bad things happen to good people, but why so many, and why does she seemingly bring them on herself, she may be well intentioned but she is a walking doormat.
A recent high school drop out, the determinedly sweet (I'm sorry but there is not better word for her) Katie lives with her ungrateful mother (Mireille Enos) in a little trailer park off of seemingly the only road in her small Arizona town. Katie works at a truck stop dinner where she has a nice boss played by Mary Steenburgen, who turns a blind eye to her side hustle as a prostitute. Strangely it is one of her sexual regulars, a truck driver played by Jim Belushi in one of his best performances, who after Steenburgen is the only old character who doesn't do Katie wrong in this picture.
Stupidly the naive Katie falls for a local mechanic (Christopher Abbott) who is recently out of prison for theft, and who hardly says a word. Katie projects all the intensity of her first love onto this unworthy vessel, a sypher who generally treats her decently, but you know from the start that won't last. The worst things happen to Katie throughout this movie, betrayed in various ways by almost everyone she knows, there is a rape scene, very unpleasant, and the cumulative effect of the film is of torture porn.
While ostensibly a character piece the film crosses a line to where it feels like it wants us to kind of get off on watching Katie suffer. A solid looking film, it is well produced, has a strong sense of place and some solid performances, but it just feels wrong. To good for me to dismiss outright, but I'd be hard pressed to recommend. **
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