There was a scene in SHERRYBABY that became an essential core to the film: Sherry (Maggie Gyllenhaal) was so furious when her own daughter stopped calling her “Mom” and realised it with anger rising as she fidgeted in her spot and started slamming the cupboard door. This, with her own personal struggle, she wanted to become the clichéd good-mother-image yet unguarded by her own self-destructiveness.

Maggie Gyllenhaal as the film’s believable, absolutely realistic character as Sherry deserves a proper applause. If not for her, this will film would squander into the mediocre status but since Gyllenhaal gave us a stunning turn as this drug-addicted single mother who wanted to reconnect and straighten things out with her young daughter, we wanted to hate her for being unbelievably foolish yet at the same time sympathise her for being human.

Sherry, who just came out of rehab (this goes out to you all the Lohan’s and Spears’ out there!), comes home again to meet her daughter who was taken care by her brother and his wife. Her reconnection was a massive struggle and she knows it straight by the time she embraces her daughter. To try to redeem herself, she admits herself into a women’s post-drug addiction centre and community service but her dispirited nature steers her away from the right things and does some things she had been wrong of doing before. She shows boobs to get herself the jobs she want and gives out sex as straightforward as handshakes, and the most horrible thing, she induces again into drug habit as she becomes self-destructive, destroying herself without hope. But the exuberance of Sherry’s character maintains her to be a believable character without any hypocrisy and Gyllenhaal sheds off masks and showiness to give a performance that would make audience become arrested; a genuine performance that made her SECRETARY role unquestionable to be the next Oscar bagger of her generation.

We might think that the story is all too familiar, but it’s the direction and the complexity of emotions that make SHERRYBABY a worthy gem. It doesn’t douse into hefty and almost cheesy melodrama and steers clear away from overused happy endings. When we witness Sherry trying to reconnect with her daughter, we understand her intentions and she indeed wanted to become a responsible mother for her child, but it’s her nature within her that was stopping her to become one. Gyllenhaal portrays Sherry as a lost soul trying to find a place in the world but along the way becomes ever so despondent because of her past that couldn’t be changed. The film also doesn’t exploit the character as a wayward person but shows us that it was her childhood that made her the way she is (cue to the scene where she was groped by her own father).

This is a wonderfully nuanced film and its cinematography blends perfectly to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s amazingly natural performance. It might not have boomed out into Oscars department but without doubt, it’s a quietly extraordinary film. It is sorrowful, moving, unpretentious and off-beat inspiring. SHERRYBABY is an honest film, and by that, there’s no question why it should be seen. You might hate or like Maggie Gyllenhaal, but for me she delivered one of 2006’s strongest female performances.

RATING: A-