If there is such a thing as a Zen of tragedy, Loggerheads embodies it beautifully. Filmed like some kind of cinematic haiku poem, Kirkman’s simple and sparse movie yields a rich abundance of soul-searching meaningfulness.

The film weaves several stories together. A mother gives up her son for adoption and then years later realizes she made a mistake and tries to find him. Parents alienate themselves from their beloved son when they find out he is gay, and now years after his running away they are haunted by their error in judgment. A woman hopelessly in love with a gay man lives a quiet, empty, lonely life in his shadow. An AIDS-stricken young gay man, who as a child was an orphan and then a runaway, wanders through life as drifter. Another gay man whose lover died as a possible hate crime victim lives on as little more than a beachcomber. And a preacher/father who can’t accept his runaway son being gay hides his sorrow in the daily regimen of Christian fundamentalism.

This is a movie in which all the main characters are lost to life--lost because each has long ago let go of someone dear to them who they now wish to find, but can't, compounded by the many years they spent in denial of their tragic error. They are not even sure how or why they lost their loved ones in the first place, and they now wander through their empty, drained lives in a kind of numbed, listless daze.

Loggerheads portrays the lives of these people as they begin to realize their mistakes and start to search for what is missing. They want to deal with the repercussions of their past actions and to make things right again. They seek redemption, it's too little, too late.

Loggerheads explores the real-life problem of children who are cast out from their families, neighbors and home towns, and the distance often created by difference. The film makes novel use of the orphan as metaphor for the chasm between many gays and their parents, and/or between gays and the world. Any homosexual who has ever experienced that kind of alienation will identify with this.

The other symbol used to good effect in the film is the Loggerhead sea turtle. The uniquely silent and precarious nature of these endangered gentle creatures, their solitary, wandering life through the vast oceans, the mother turtles who always return to the exact spot on the beach of their own birth to lay eggs, and the hatchling baby turtles who are highly susceptible to predators and danger--all of these evocative images are hauntingly analogous to the characters’ actions in this film.

Kudos to whoever thought of using an old, sea-green painted Volkswagen beetle as the car Grace (Bonnie Hunt) uses on her quest thru North Carolina to find her long lost son. Filmed from afar, it appears like a giant tortoise silently cruising the wilds, harkening back to the movie’s Loggerhead turtle theme.

Loggerheads is especially notable for its well-developed female characters, with women of all types and ages represented and motherhood serving as one of the primary themes of the film. Nuanced, inspired and memorable performances are offered up by such fine actors as Bonnie Hunt, as Grace, who is trying to find her long-lost son; Tess Harper as adoptive mother Elizabeth, a conservative minister's wife struggling to confront her husband over their estrangement from their son; and Ann Owens Pierce as reclusive Ruth, the one rational, self-actualized person in the film, who understands the tragedy that has befallen all the other characters but is powerless to help.

Of special interest to gay viewers of the film is the engrossingly sensual and romantic chemistry generated between actors Kip Pardue (Mark), and Michael Kelly (George). Even without explicit sex scenes, these two manage to conjure up considerable heat whenever they are onscreen together. Mark and George's obvious attraction to each other makes the hopelessness of their “two ships in the night” situation all the more tragic, as all eyes can see what a great couple these two would make.