15 is a difficult age to be. Even in the best of circumstances, the way your life has gone up until now is going away. You’re not quite an adult but expected to sort of be like one. Then you notice that most adults don’t seem much like adults, either.(Scout Purdy), the best of circumstances left a long time ago.
Still, she’s holding it together while navigating high school almost too well. If she can’t quite let go enough to grieve the loss of her mother, she’s not alone. Or rather, her father Tom (Doug Purdy) would share the burden but he’s too busy trying to shield her from the slings and arrows of their lives.
When she accidentally finds out that her older brother Ellis (Maxwell Purdy) has been accepted to college on the east coast, it’s time for Jo to stand up and confront her pain. Logically, that means she needs to get lost in the woods. But she’s taking Tom with her.
Co-written and co-directed by Scout and Doug Purdy, Pilgrim plays with the tropes of a 1970s family movie but gives them a fresh spin. Tracing her mother’s footsteps, Jo convinces her father to hike and camp in California coastal woods. Though of course they get what they need, it doesn’t appear in any way they expected.
The father-daughter filmmakers let the drama lie as subtext, instead letting comedy play out in the natural family dynamic. Jo and Tom have a normal fumbling relationship with the elephant of Mom’s death between them. But when other people get involved, their bond tightens if only so they can share a laugh.
That’s not to say everything is played for laughs. Instead, it’s played for humanity. Even the low-key buffoonery of cabin caretaker Derek (Ryan Bollman) resonates. He’s awkward but well-meaning, and clearly dependent on his wife Allison (Brooke Purdy) to keep things running. We can laugh with them because they’re real. A few characters play out more cartoonishly, but if you’ve ever encountered influencers in the wild, you’ll know that Scout hasn’t really exaggerated them.
Like the Purdy Family’s earlier film Quality Problems, Pilgrim embraces who we are, how flawed we can be, and still adds up to how good we can be. They haven’t convinced me to do late-life camping, but they do remind me to be kinder to myself at 59. It hasn’t gotten much better since 15, but maybe that’s the point. We just are, and we need to stop and celebrate that once in a while.
Read the profile on the Purdys here.
