- Hank seeks comfort from Faith, only to find her with someone else. Hank meets two very important people in Faith's life. On the home front, Becca has some big news.
- Becca informs her parents that she wishes to go on a pilgrimage of her favorite expatriate writers to Europe. Karen (classy as always Natascha McElhone) supports her daughter, perhaps inwardly against her better judgment, for the sake of being a supportive parent. Hank smells the pitfalls of this, and opposes, much to Karen's chagrin.
Off to Laurel Canyon again, where Faith's stay at Beckett Fetch's gated mansion with the swimming pool is at an end. Guy's returned from Australia where he met a model he brought back home and they're going to set up house and the blonde housesitter. (golden-haired, long-legged Maggie Grace) is 'kicked to the curb', and Hank worries about her. But she loves being a drifter, 'and men has always been kind to her' and before they can go into a deeper discussion, her phone buzzes. Mom. She knows the score, and doesn't even bother to answer. Questioned by Hank, she reveals that her mother is a c*** "who takes the warm and fuzzy out of c***" and Hank is much taken with her prose. Worried about his own daughter, Hank urges her to give her parents a chance, and she agrees, if he'll come along. A ride on Interstate 405. To some undisclosed American town. Wholesome-looking place, Hank says he grew up some place similar 3 000 miles away.
Turns out Faith (named by her mother, no doubt) grew up in an absurdly over-emphasized Christian home devoid of any real love. Dad has to sneak a peek at an adult channel, the only fun he is ever going to get. If he doesn't touch himself, nobody else would...
Mrs. Faith's Mom, as Hank boyishly calls her, is at least relieved to see that Faith hasn't brought home another tattooed greasy-haired skunk. Dad, too, expected someone like that. It is clear to Hank that Faith brought home men of a certain type. Obviously her rebellious stage, to shock her parents?
Dad just wants them to go fetch him a few beverages from the liquor store, for that's not something his strict wife condones. Outside Circus Liquor, they share a tender kiss in the car, Faith thanking him for making her come (and Hank not missing the obvious opportunity to play on those words) and inside, they meet up with Shannon, a friend from Faith's high school days. Shannon is heavily pregnant - her third - and she is clearly going to seed, not caring one little bit about fetal health in her attitude to smoking weed and drinking alcohol . Hank introduces himself as Faith's fiance. Charles Wolfgang Runkle in a fake British accent, and Shannon comments on Faith's appearance in a music video, or was it a sex tape? Rehashing her mother's disappointment in her, the way she tells everybody her daughter joined the Peace Corps. While everybody knew she was slutting it out in the back of a tour bus... Shannon points out that Faith used to be bookish and quiet until just busting loose one day, screwing everybody in sight, including her guy, Larry Walters, then of the band Mysstery, also there in the shop, the sloppy guy going to pot, leering at Faith. Hank fakes having to take a cellphone call, it's on vibrate so it didn't ring, though Shannon catches him out as his phone's screen isn't on. "Stop staring, you fat pig!" Shannon exclaims to her husband, who goes "I totally f****d her" reliving glory days never to be seen again.
Sitting down for dinner, Hank and Faith recalls how they 'met cute' in a place and at a time when he was displeased with himself, searching enlightenment, and of course, to myopic Mrs.Faith's Mom, that place could only have been a church. The couple decide not to rectify her, keeping mum to Mom re the rehab center. Mom of course has a particular fondness for the Bible, and Hank informs her quite righteously that he bonded with her daughter over a page of the Old Testament (final scene of Quitters (2013)) and that, yes, like Mom says, Faith knows her Bible backwards and forwards, she inhaled it (rolling a joint back in rehab)... Saying grace is used as a judgmental tool by the religious fanatic who thanks her Lord for Faith's safe return delivered from evil, as she assumes all of Faith's "perverted"musician friends she had been "whoring" with to be "the devil's children" carrying sexually-transmitted diseases. Hank points out that these musicians wrote odes to her daughter, but Mom harpers on that it had been in return for her daughter having sucked their "filthy pen**es" and Faith has to defend the actions she took in her way of trying to make this world a better place. Dad blurts out how Mom wished Faith to become a nun, and it comes out that Mom, who believes in the eternal forgiveness of some higher power, has, ironically, not really forgiven her real-life living-and-breathing flesh-and-blood beautiful daughter for abandoning that mission. Faith tearfully cries that she has done her utmost to forgive, and still love, her mean-spirited mother. Dinner is, of course, a bust, with everybody now upset. Dad laments that, since Faith rarely if ever shows, the conversation should have stayed with the weather.
Hank is incredulous to discover Faith had been a nun. They visit a Catholic church. She recalls her embarrassment at being caught out by older nuns while she was pleasuring herself. Hank confides about his own recurring dream involving receiving absolution from a nun in church in a most blasphemous way, and ever-willing Faith, after a cursory glance backwards to make sure no earthly soul is watching, proceeds to (off-camera) pull down his zipper and perform fellatio. Hank, to himself, in a voice filled with awe, "Who says dreams don't come true?"
Back at the house, long-suffering Dad requests of Faith to go apologize to her mother, even if she is out of her mind. He and Hank drinks beer together, the old guy regretting the hard time Faith had growing up like 'a rat in a cage' between her strict parents, and Hank confiding that he is worried about his own daughter as well.
In the childhood room kept intact, Mom apologizes to Faith for having spewed forth so many nasty things. She likes the cross-shaped pendant (from Dead Rock Stars (2013)) and looks at it appreciatively. Hank comes in and reports that Dad has gone back to watching soft-core pornography again, so he felt uncomfortable and walked out. Mom smells the beer and suggests they need a rest. She quite understandably ushers Hank to the couch, no way they are sharing a bed, not under her roof, not until there is a ring on her daughter's finger.
Faith lies back and has a disturbing vision of herself as the hot Catholic short-skirted schoolgirl come to pay penance, but the Jesus figure on the cross turns out to be Atticus Fetch who rather demonically frees himself from impalement to come down, to the tune of Marilyn Manson's "Personal Jesus" going Reach Out and Touch Me, Reach Out and Touch Me, to seduce her. Waking up startled, she rushes off to find her parents.
Faith lovingly covers up her father, who has dozed off during his soft-core watching, with a blanket, kissing him on his forehead. The TV screen shows National Geographic gone haywire with two turtles copulating? In her mother's room, she takes the pendant and places it equally lovingly on the sleeping woman's chest. Then she goes to wake up Hank and they get the hell out of there, "'Drive', she said!"
A much-wiser Hank realizes that a rift must be avoided at all costs, and is pleased to see that he and Karen now finally agrees on something: Allow Becca her sojourn.
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