The Resolutions

February 10, 2020
In Hammes’s entertaining debut, three siblings return to their hometown of Chicago for a Christmas full of reckoning and misadventure. Samantha Brennan is a talented American dancer with a Moscow company whose work is compromised by her heroin addiction. Her brother Jonah is in Gabon doing his thesis on elephant communication until he runs afoul of some deadly ivory poachers, and her other brother Gavin is an actor in L.A. whose latest television series has just been canceled. Once home with their parents, Gavin and Jonah try to convince Sam to clean up her act, though Jonah has failed to sever his link to the poachers, who coerced him into smuggling ivory into the U.S. Eventually, all three siblings wind up in Gabon, where their bonds are mightily tested. Hammes brings his three fractious main characters to riotous life and turns their reunion into a life-changing journey that proves Jonah’s insightful assertion that a sibling is “like a part of yourself you can never really know.” This reads like a clever mash-up of Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You, Romain Gary’s The Roots of Heaven, and Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States, and delivers thrills while finding empathy for the cast’s troubled souls.