Loggerheads (2005)

Image credit: LOGGERHEADS: Kathryn Tucker

WHO NAMES THEIR KID KIP? A gay son (right) and his trip back to the family and religion that left him

Filmmakers are often praised for being ''good with actors,'' but how does that skill work? In the case of Tim Kirkman, who wrote and directed Loggerheads, a touching and savory Southern ensemble drama, it means that he gets his actors to find colorful shades of experience in dialogue even as they reveal, at the same time, a mysterious private side — the dream they won't say aloud. It also means that Kirkman is shrewd enough to coax a wistful performance out of pretty boy Kip Pardue (I'm not joking). He plays a young gay drifter who heads to North Carolina to study loggerhead turtles, but really to reconcile with his adoptive parents — a stern minister (Chris Sarandon) and his loyally prim wife, played by Tess Harper as a woman who hides sadness even from herself. Pardue creates something fresh: a free-spirited Christian traditionalist who embraces the tradition that rejected him. Michael Kelly, as the gentle motel owner who learns Pardue's secret, and Bonnie Hunt, as a middle-class wreck looking for the child she gave up, complete the film's moving mosaic of connections found and lost.