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Trucker (USA 2008, 90 min, dir: James Motten, cast: Michelle Monaghan, Benjamin Bratt, Nathan Fillion)

Michelle Monaghan is Diane, a tough trucker who lives on the road and fucks handsome drivers without leaving her phone number. But somewhere out there beyond the darkness she’s got a kid who she’s left with her ex-husband Len (Benjamin Bratt).

This is a riff on the white line fever picture that has a been a Hollywood staple since They Drive by Night (1940). As soon as I see a kid in a movie with a tough guy or babe, my sentimentality buzzer goes off. You know where it is going the moment Daddy says Mommy has to take the tyke. I reviewed Mostly Martha and No Reservations on MovieWithMe. In those make and remake movies, the woman is a top chef and the kid is the precocious niece whose parents have been conveniently killed in an auto accident.

Trucker at least gives us a tough kid to match his mother’s lifestyle. Though I wish he smoked cigarettes like she does-that would be a cinematic breakthrough. But Tucker is something a little more than its predictable story: it is a road movie about nights and highways and dank motels. This is a genre in itself; always supported by an ample catalogue of country and western songs that reveal emotions big rig drivers never can.

In most countries, guys drive trucks and drink beer. Only in American do they also live in a mythic dimension. (One exception: The Wages of Fear, but that is really an American style movie made by the French). These movies are more than C&W music and lost characters: they are an extension of our western cowboy themes. You can be lonely watching the fire burn down with your horse tethered on the lonely desert: or you can be lonely in the cab of your Kenworth lighting the white line bend around the earth ahead.