The movie is about what poor people have to do to make it in an impoverished rural area.     It was filmed in North Dakota and Canada.   Farming is North Dakota’s state industry.  The movie is set in a rural area inspired by Williston, North Dakota.   It is a documentary on poverty and drug abuse.

Ollie’s (played by Tessa Thompson) downhill spiral started when she had to cross into Canada at North Dakota’s border to get discounted prescription medicine for her dying mother, which got her caught up in the drug trade.   After some jail time and eventual parole, she makes herself content with providing laundry services and selling home-made sandwiches and coffee to workers who constantly ask her for pain pills.   She turns them all down because she is trying to get enough money to keep the home that she and her mother lived in before she gets evicted.  No one was making house payments for months.  I wonder why her homeless sister Deb didn’t move back in with Ollie to help with expenses.  Perhaps there was a past troubling relationship with her mother or Ollie.

Her sister Deb (played by Lily James) already has a child by her husband Ian (played by James Badge Dale) who appears to be living in some kind of group home himself, and she gets pregnant a second time.    Deb was already living in an abandoned RV in a superstore parking lot, thinking that the notices repeatedly posted on the RV didn’t mean that she had to move any time soon.    So, Deb decides that she needs an abortion because her first child’s father already is not taking care of that child—the reason she was living in an abandoned RV in the first place I assume.  But she is told that an abortion would cost $8,000 without health insurance.  Deb doesn’t have health insurance. 

Tessa’s character Ollie gets back into the drug trade to help her sister and keep her mother’s house so she herself will have a place to live.   Drug dealing is something she promised herself she would never do again because she’s on parole after doing it for her mother.   But now she has to do it again to get her unlucky sister out of trouble.   Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.

To top it off, Bill, the local drug dealer (played by Luke Kirby) fronts her the money for the drugs so she can give him a cut of her business and, basically, she ends up working for him.   After arriving in Canada, her sister was nearly raped trying to get an illegal ID so she can get a free abortion in Canada.   And, she and her sister were nearly arrested by a Canadian policeman for loitering.  To top it off, Deb brought her child with them on the trip.   He was sleeping in a cold car.   Then, Ollie’s connection in Canada kept Deb’s child while Ollie took her sister to enroll in a program that would allow her to get the abortion. Opioids are the kind of drugs she purchases for average working people who need to work while in pain in jobs with no benefits or health insurance.   Ollie makes her former drug connection and gets the opioids that the American workers need. 

Tessa’s character Ollie can’t keep the money in her mother’s house because her parole officer makes regular searches of her home as part of her parole, so her sister volunteers to keep the money in the trailer.    I’m sure you can guess that the inevitable happened with the trailer.

The only bright spot (thank God there is one) is when Tessa’s character gets interviewed for a job through the efforts of her parole officer (played by Lance Reddick).   I found myself cussing out the characters trying to get them to avoid the obvious mire into which they were sinking, much like a horror movie.   I was glad when the horror of the movie ended.  I hoped that things would turn around for them.   At the end of the movie, it was still questionable whether they would survive.

Although the movie was intense—wrong step after wrong step—Tessa Thompson and Lily James gave award-winning performances.   Tessa Thompson I have seen in many things (Men in Black International, Furlough, Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Endgame, etc.), but she really displays the hopelessness of the situation she continues to get into just to help her family.   The half-sister played by Lily James is stuck in a bad lifestyle of her own making although we aren’t told why she’s not with her husband.   Lily James I know from the Downton Abbey television show, where I saw her for the first time.   Then I saw her in Cinderella and Mama Mia 2. 

The songs in the movie are so solemn because there is not much happiness in this movie.   Nia DaCosta is the writer and director.    Although watching this movie was like watching an inevitable accident that you can’t turn your eyes away from, I enjoyed the movie.   Official site:  https://www.littlewoodsmovie.com.

Other sources:

Melissa Healy, “How Factory Closings May Have Fed Opioid Crisis:  Study Finds More Overdoses in Areas Hit by Loss of Auto Jobs”, Baltimore Sun, SunPlus, Thursday, February 6, 2020.   The auto industry closing of factories have influenced drug use.  

Peter Debruge, “’Little Woods’ Review:  Nia DaCosta’s Tough, North Dakota-Set Debut”, https://variety.com/film/reviews, April 19, 2019.   I quote from this Variety review: “So much of the recent political debate has focused on the United States’ southern border, and the threat of illegal drugs and criminals filtering up through Mexico.  But what of the north, where Americans traffic opiates and prescription pills from Canada across a border that runs nearly three times as long?” 

Deborah Rudacille, “Photos:  What Bethlehem Steel Meant to Baltimore; In Baltimore, Visions of Life After Steel”, May 15, 2019, Citylab.com.    I would also say the loss of manufacturing jobs period influenced drug use, including the closing of Sparrows Point’s Bethlehem Steel in 2012 in Maryland.

Written by Rosa L. Griffin