‘Omaha’ Review: John Magaro Is Heartbreaking in Slender but Affecting Drama About Grief and Fatherhood

It’s enormously gratifying to see John Magaro in a solo leading role. While he was one point of the love triangle in Past Lives, a joint lead in September 5 and First Cow, and an ensemble standout in Showing Up, seldom has this undervalued actor been given the opportunity to carry a film to the extent he does in Omaha. Scripted by The Killing of Two Lovers writer-director Robert Machoian, Cole Webley’s debut feature aims for a similar stripped-down rawness in its account of a bereaved father facing desperate choices.

Gentle to a fault, the drama for much of its running time has a weightlessness familiar from many Sundance movies, an impression amplified in the delicate score by Christopher Bear, formerly of the indie rock band Grizzly Bear, and in a sprinkling of hushed vocal tracks. It’s also there in the expressive use of landscape, with unspoken feelings echoing across Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats and the vast stretches that flank Interstate 80, empty aside from the spindly figures of wind turbines.

Webley is in no rush to turn up the film’s emotional wattage, but that eventually happens as the story inches closer to its devastating conclusion, in which Magaro’s character, identified only as Dad, lets loose a torrent of anguished feeling. His performance up to that point has been notable mainly for its internalized pain and the corrosive uncertainty written across his face, which makes the release all the more moving.

Machoian’s script gives us time to piece together the background, but it’s quietly evident from the start, when Dad wakes up his 9-year-old daughter Ella (terrific newcomer Molly Belle Wright) at an uncommonly early hour, telling her to pack for a road trip, that this won’t be a pleasure outing. Ella’s younger brother Charlie (Wyatt Earp) sits in the back seat of the run-down car with their golden retriever Rex, mostly oblivious to the tension up front. But preternaturally mature Ella closely observes her father, whose evasive answers to her questions about their destination do nothing to set her mind at rest.

It emerges that the kids’ mother has died after an illness and that Dad is struggling to support the family while working through his grief. Or letting it crush him. The car often requires a running push to get the engine started and the shortage of cash and food stamps means that the children get their Lunchables while their father frequently goes without. Dad’s T-shirt indicates that his field is construction, but work has likely dried up in the 2008 financial crisis.

Still, he keeps up a brave face as much as possible, reassuring Ella and Charlie that the trip will be a fun adventure and singing along with the kids to one of their mother’s favorite songs, Tommy James & The Shondells’ “Mony Mony,” on the car stereo. He even stretches the budget, buying them a kite to fly when they get to the salt flats while he makes anxious calls in the car, mostly unheard.

But that reprieve of rambunctious freedom for Ella and Charlie precedes a traumatic blow when Dad makes a distressing decision, firmly telling them, “It’s for the best.” We see it coming in the father’s sorrowful private moments, but for the children it hits without warning. It’s also not hard to guess what the trip is building up to when they arrive at their destination, which Ella finally learns is Nebraska. But that doesn’t lessen the outcome’s undeniable impact.

Webley, a veteran of short films and commercials, never shrinks away from the heart-rending nature of the story, which reflects a bleak reality perhaps familiar to many struggling families from America’s underclass.

But the filmmakers leaven the mood before the hammer drops with a lovely interlude at the Omaha Zoo, an idea planted in Ella’s head by a friendly young mother in line to pay at a gas station. Running with excitement from one animal enclosure to the next, Ella and Charlie’s apprehension is erased for one carefree afternoon; even Dad’s smiles make it appear his troubled mind has been eased. 

Everything that follows, however, is emotionally lacerating, conveyed on the children’s distraught, confused faces, and hitting Dad like a ton of bricks. Magaro in those moments physicalizes the breaking point of his character’s debilitating hopelessness with shattering effectiveness.

While the drama depicts a situation most parents would find unthinkable, it does so with unfailing compassion and sensitivity, channeled in the kindness of Talia Balsam’s brief appearance as a hospital nurse. Which makes it jarring when onscreen text that precedes the end credits reduces what’s been a profoundly human and humane story to cold statistics. But that blunt segue aside, Omaha delivers a haunting payoff.