The only American road trip movie with its origins in a Dartford council estate
The road movie has always been quintessentially American; for a country composed of miles and miles of vast expanses, deserts, highways, forests, and beaches, there’s plenty of terrain to be covered in the quest for the ‘American Dream’.
A road movie doesn’t really work the same in Britain as you’d probably just be on the motorway for a lot of it, stopping at the nearest Moto service station to pick up an overpriced M&S meal deal alongside other weary travellers who get in your way as they saunter a little too slowly to the toilets or crowd around Costa waiting for their (likely burnt) coffee; it’s not exactly Badlands or Thelma and Louise.
Regardless, the genre has evolved over the years, sometimes depicting couples on the run, while others focus on platonic and familial endeavours, such as Alice in the Cities and Paris, Texas, which saw German filmmaker Wim Wenders champion the road movie in the 1970s and early 1980s, and in the latter, he brought a foreign eye to the American tradition of the genre, offering a transcendental approach to this medium of journeying and searching for truth and meaning, whereas other filmmakers often take a more visceral approach, like in raunchier hits such as Natural Born Killers or Wild at Heart.
Clearly, you don’t have to be American to make a great American road movie as Paris, Texas suggests, and back in 2016, Andrea Arnold made another case for the genre, chronicling a journey across the American Midwest in her film American Honey. She didn’t grow up in the States, born and raised on a Dartford council estate, with the Kent town a far cry from the landscapes that define her film, but Arnold used her experience of growing up in such a strikingly different place to inform her approach to depicting such a foreign environment.
While the American Midwest might seem a lot different to Dartford, Arnold was soon able to draw comparisons to these less economically prosperous settings, pulling from her experience of making gritty social realist dramas set in Britain and using this to frame a slightly different vision of poverty and the search for freedom. That vision she saw of America when she was younger, in road movies made throughout the decades, merges with her own background as a social realist storyteller.
“America is a vast and complicated place filled with all kinds of truths and contradictions, and I wanted to find my own emotional connection to it,” she told The Guardian, “Otherwise, I couldn’t have made this film. It’s a mixture of what I saw and learned on those travels, but also what I grew up seeing on films, the mythical America of westerns and road movies. That’s all in there, too.”
Arnold’s career as a filmmaker began with a series of short films, and she even won an Oscar for Wasp, which followed a young single mother’s struggles between looking after her children and trying to maintain a social and romantic life.
Her debut feature, Red Road, is a stunning look at obsession and revenge, while Fish Tank, arguably her magnum opus, focuses its lens on a troubled and lonely working-class girl’s difficult family life, and for American Honey, she brought these themes to a wider audience, exploring the life of a young woman who escapes her abusive household and joins a travelling sales group as they journey across America.
A tale of love, freedom, and discovery, the film featured Sasha Lane, Riley Keough, and Shia LaBeouf, it won various accolades, including four British Independent Film Awards, and saw Arnold imbue this distinctly American genre with a British edge, even if her characters would likely frown if you asked them if they’ve ever heard of Kent.
