DN:FILM Breaking Habits
Sister Kate is on a mission from ganja. Despite her proudly affixed white habit, this sister is not a wisp religious—even as she strives to be a savior. In Rob Ryan’s BREAKING HABITS, cannabis is Kate’s sacrament, and her habit is just that: a habitual symbol of her holy summons to deliver marijuana to the dying and terminally ill in California’s impoverished Central Valley. “My job is the sacred calling to healing,” says Sister Kate, nee Christine Meeusen, a successful corporate executive who finds her entire life, with three children, leveled when her supposedly idyllic marriage of 17 years sensationally and financially implodes.
Hitting restart, Kate moves to Merced, Calif., to live in her brother’s home, where her sibling exhorts her to grow marijuana for income. Medicinal pot is legal there, and soon-to-be Sister Kate embraces self-reinvention with prickly resolve. “I began dreaming of a sisterhood that could heal the people, heal the valley,” she says. The doc is tryingly sketchy about how this kernel pops into Sister Kate’s founding of Sisters of the Valley, an industrious marijuana dispensary in Merced. Local law enforcement bristles at the trade, yet Kate, as steely as she is saintly, maintains its legality through the courts.
Sisters of the Valley is comprised of some six mostly very young acolytes who don nun habits like it’s Halloween: They cosplay the cloth. They are “like-minded women who believe in rebelling against the system and believe in the healing power of the cannabis plant,” says Sister Kate, who, yes, huffs the occasional puff. Starting with a couple of spindly backyard plants, Kate somehow manages to grow heaps of herbal product; the hows and whys of production are hard to fathom due to the doc’s rushed and spotty editing. She concocts cannabis oils and lotions and sells them without a license, remaining the reformist renegade, the sativa samaritan, crafting redemption out of ruin. “I am a self-declared, self-empowered, anarchist, activist nun,” our heroine proclaims. This inspiring if loosely rolled film leaves her at her word, divine or not.