James Mottern's Trucker is a throwback, the kind of low-budget, low-impact drama about grubby, ordinary people that used to be as plentiful at film festivals as fleas on a sheepdog in summertime. They still make these kinds of movies, of course, and one way to get one not just made but shown in a few places is to cast an attractive, up-and-coming actor or actress who's tired of being used as set direction and wants to show that he or she can act, or at least pass for ordinary. The title character in Trucker stars Michelle Monaghan, who looked a little too dewy fresh to be spending her afternoons interrogating neighborhood barroom toughs in Gone Baby Gone. She looks much looser and happier in her first scenes here, playing Diane, a long-haul trucker who owns her own rig and lives by herself in her little San Diego crash pad. You can see what attracted Monaghan to this role. She's terrific in her opening scene, preparing to leave a motel and get back on the room but first impatiently trying to keep a straight while listening to the naked, nameless stud in the bed sheepishly assure her that he wasn't just "using" her. She also does fine teamwork with Nathan Fillion, who plays the less macho half of their relationship; he's the married "best friend" who's been pining for her for four years while serving as her steady platonic date between one-night stands. When she joins him at a kids' softball game and stares at him in dismay when she sees what's in his go-cup, Fillion drawls, "I'm not drinkin', per se, I'm celebratin' life."
Trucker might have sustained itself better if it hadn't had any plot at all, but probably Mottern didn't feel that he was ready to try anything too avant-garde. So Diane, like half the women in movies these days, acquires a kid. Unlike Tina Fey in Baba Mama, she got hers the old-fashioned way, by getting pregnant by Benjamin Bratt and then leaving him a dozen years before the movie starts. The little life changer lands on her doorstep when Bratt succombs to colon cancer and is too busy dying to stay on top of the play date schedule. (Bratt, who could use a career jump=start of his own--didn't his character leave Law & Order because his wife was sick? has he considered offering to come back to the show, given that she must have died by now?-- has a big tearjerker death bed scene with the kid. "I guess you can tell by looking at me that I'm not in the best shape of my life," he says, but in fact he looks pretty and well-fed and hale enough to bench-press a horse. Maybe the film crew couldn't afford to rent some footage of sick people for him to look at, though the makeup department did do its best to help out by apparently painting his head light gray, perhaps to see what he'd look like playing the early version of the Incredible Hulk.)
Monaghan and the kid have a decent exchange early on; she asks him why he doesn't want to talk to her, he replies, "I don't talk to bitches," and she says, "Fair enough." But soon she's turning all motherly and repentant in the face of all the contrivance, with the little bastard functioning as a living, breathing "J'accuse!" Trying to push him away for his own good, she bawls, "I am who I am! I'm always gonna be like this," and from her tone you may end up wondering if you missed a couple of reels where she was robbing banks and sending the money to Bin Laden or sacrificing puppies to Satan, her dark lord. To fully appreciate Trucker on its own terms, you have to be prepared to react with horror to the idea that a woman who works hard at her job and who even turns out to be a pretty good mother when she has to be might sometimes want to arrange her own play date to sneak off to a Motel 6 with a handsome stranger and fuck each other's brains out.