King of the Hill

“When the world turns upside down, the trick is coming out on top.”

Aaron Kurlander (Jesse Bradford) is left to run his own life in a St. Louis hotel after his mother is sent to a sanatorium with tuberculosis. His father (Jeroen Krabbé), a German immigrant selling watches on the road, travels for weeks and may not come back on schedule. Soderbergh adapts A. E. Hotchner's Depression-era memoir, and the strongest bond in it is the one between Aaron and the father he keeps waiting on.