Take a Road Trip Through Grief, Female Friendship, and Self-Discovery with 'Bonneville'

The core premise of Christopher N. Rowley’s Bonneville is deceptively simple: a grieving widow embarks on a road trip across the American West to scatter her late husband’s ashes. But zoom out and the film is something far more profound. Set against the sun-baked highways of the Southwest, Bonneville follows Arvilla Holden (played by Jessica Lange), a woman navigating sudden loss while flanked by her two lifelong best friends, as she transforms a high-stakes family dispute into an unexpected journey of self-discovery. Bonneville is a tender, nuanced coming-of-age tale—not for youth, but for midlife—that demands neither cynicism nor sentimentality. Instead, it simply observes the healing power of female friendship in real time.

Arvilla has spent two decades building a quiet life in Pocatello, Idaho, with her husband, Joe. But when Joe dies while on vacation in Borneo, Arvilla’s world shatters before she even returns home. Enter Francine (Christine Baranski), Joe’s resentful daughter, who issues a ruthless ultimatum: surrender Joe’s ashes for the family crypt in California, or lose the home left to Francine in an outdated will. Facing an impossible choice, Arvilla reluctantly agrees to hand over the urn and recruits her two closest friends—Margene (Kathy Bates), a fiercely independent former teacher, and Carol (Joan Allen), a devout Mormon—to accompany her to the memorial service.

The three women pile into Arvilla’s 1966 Pontiac Bonneville convertible, but an unexpected detour to the Bonneville Salt Flats sends their carefully planned journey in a new direction. As they make their way through the American West, they encounter a young man searching for his roots and a long-distance trucker wrestling with his own grief, each offering a different perspective on loss and moving forward. Meanwhile, the trip brings old tensions between Carol and Margene to the surface, challenging the women to see one another—and themselves—in new ways.

The film’s vivid landscape reinforces its central themes, utilizing the vast expanses of the American West to mirror Arvilla’s transition from suffocating grief to emotional release. Anyone who has ever leaned on a friend during their darkest hour will see a piece of themselves in Bonneville.

Stream Bonneville now on Kino Film Collection.

Bonneville (2006)