Trucker - C

Diane (Michelle Monaghan) lives in small-town California when she isn't driving the big rig tractor-trailer she just paid off. She's on the road the majority of the year and this prevents any emotional attachments (she prefers to slut it up with strangers on the road). When her ex-husband (Benjamin Bratt) is hospitalized with colon cancer and his new wife (Joey Lauren Adams) has to leave town because of her sick mother, Diane is charged with taking care of her estranged 11 year old son - whom she hasn't seen in 10 years . . .

Monaghan makes her unsympathetic character watchable by living in the moment and having a face the camera adores. She's gone a little gritty before (in Gone Baby Gone), and seems just as comfortable there as she does doing the glamorous thing. The scenes with her son (Jimmy Bennett - the young car-driving James T. Kirk in the latest Star Trek) are rough to sit through, but certainly feel authentic. Bratt and Adams have some nice small scenes, both playing against type.

By not explaining everything about Diane and her history, writer-director James Mottern allows the audience to apply their own life experience to the film - and it's nice not being spoon-fed. But Diane has a grim, unhappy existence and some late scenes about growing up and accepting responsibility don't make up for the patchy, predictable narrative that precedes it. Mottern uses his camera well to show the truck-stop culture and the working class suburbs. But most of the film just falls flat, even with the easy stuff like showing the American landscapes and picking a good bar song. Trucker is very similar thematically to Come Early Morning (directed by Joey Lauren Adams!), but that film kept building throughout and had a satisfying, honest resolution. C