Blood is not just thicker than water in Adam Christian Clark's feature directorial debut Caroline and Jackie, it's also the glue that binds two seemingly different sisters together.
The story begins with Caroline (Marguerite Moreau) surprising her sister Jackie (Bitsie Tulloch) with a birthday party, even though Jackie's actual birthday was two months ago. The sisters and some mutual friends share an awkward dinner at a local restaurant, and when everyone reconvenes afterward we find out why the evening has had such an odd vibe: It turns out Caroline has set up an intervention for her seemingly troubled sibling. As accusations of anorexia, sexual addiction, and drug problems fly fast and furious, the fraught history of the pair bubbles to the surface, along with a number of secrets kept by the other people in their lives.
There is something very stage-bound about Caroline and Jackie, as it's the kind of dialogue-heavy story in which the audience's perception of who is telling the truth shifts from scene to scene; characters we had put our trust in turn out to be thoroughly unreliable, and people we chalked up as lost causes might just have been speaking honestly all along. For about the first half of the movie's running time, the guessing game is a fun one, augmented greatly by Moreau and Tulloch's compelling chemistry -- you believe they have a bond that keeps them united in a way that nobody can quite penetrate.
As good as they are, their story runs out of steam about halfway into the movie, and in order to stretch it out, Clark throws in the issues of various friends and significant others. Whenever those people become the focus of a scene, it feels like padding to get the picture to feature length. Nobody is as interesting as the two title characters, and you begin to realize that while Clark has cooked up a fantastic situation and cast his leads smartly, he doesn't have a resolution. While there's no doubt the film was written, it has the feel of being an improvisation that never led to a satisfying ending.
Visually, Clark does quite well, especially with a limited budget. There's a scene in which everybody goes swimming that has a blurry, dreamlike quality that underscores how emotionally exhausted the characters are that late into the night. However, by that point we've grown bored with the whole situation, something that didn't seem likely when Caroline and Jackie's long dark evening of soul searching, and the movie itself, started.