Home Cinema
by Leonard Heldreth

Growing up...with a Y chromosome
   Much has been written in the press in recent years about the difficulties of growing up, and our films this month show the problems that boys encounter trying to make that transition to adulthood. Whether it's a British comedy, an American fantasy underpinned by superhero action, an updated version of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, or a bleak account of Glasgow during the garbage strikes, all of the protagonists, confused and endangered, seldom reach maturity unscathed.

 

About a Boy
   Perhaps the most surprising thing about About a Boy is that it was directed by Paul and Chris Weitz, notorious for their American Pie series, but, other than dealing with boys growing up, this film bears little similarity to that series.
   Based on a novel by Paul Hornsby (popular British author of High Fidelity, the novel made into a film with John Cusack), About a Boy tells how two boys, one in his teens (Marcus played by Nicholas Hoult) and the other in his late thirties (Will Freeman played by Hugh Grant), help each other grow up. Will lives quite well on the royalties from a Christmas ditty that his father wrote years ago, and he enjoys his toys, records, car, TV shows, women (briefly) and his life broken into thirty-minute segments of activity. He cultivates being comfortably shallow.
   Marcus is a nerd whom classmates enjoy tormenting for his clothes, non-cool demeanor and his mother, Fiona. Fiona dresses like a refugee from a second-hand thrift store of the sixties, and she cries a lot from being depressed. In one of her first appearances in the film she is unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills. Marcus not only has to figure out how to get through adolescence but how to take care of his mother.
   Will decides that single mothers are good subjects for his attention--they're lonely, and when they find out he has lied to them about having a son, they will dump him, saving him the need to end the affair. He attends a single-parents' support group and meets a friend of Fiona's who is taking care of Marcus as well as her own son. He helps the friend save Fiona from her suicide attempt, and then a day or so later Marcus shows up at his apartment. Grudgingly, Will lets the boy hang around, and slowly Marcus learns to be "cool" and Will begins to learn that keeping everyone at a distance has a downside. The plot goes through several convolutions, with Marcus at one time posing as Will's son, before it comes to a resolution with everyone showing up at Will's for Christmas dinner.
   Hugh Grant, with his hair cut short, simply is excellent as a charming cad who slowly changes as the film proceeds, and Marcus is impressive as the klutzy teenager. Toni Collette, dressed in macrame and sixties cast-offs, almost steals the show as Marcus's needy mother, who should be an unsympathetic character but claims our sympathy nevertheless. The film is a comedy, and the actors know how to wring laughs from the situations, particularly two restaurant scenes. The highpoint of the film is Will joining Marcus at the high school talent show and performing an absolutely awful version of Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly." While it's not a cinematic masterpiece, About a Boy is an upbeat film with laughs, some emotional moments and first-rate acting. Most people will enjoy it.

Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
   Don't be misled by this film's title -- it's not about pedophiles or sexual scandals in the Catholic church. Rather, this screen adaptation of Chris Fuhrman's semi-autobiographical novel of growing up in the '70s in the South explores the way adolescent boys expand the boundaries of their perceptions and abilities by both supporting each other and pushing each other into situations of danger.
   Francis Doyle (Emile Hirsch) and Tim Sullivan (Kieran Culkin, one of the Culkin brothers--see the following review of Igby) are high school friends, and both serve as altar boys to Father Casey (Vincent D'Onofrio).
   They attend a Catholic school presided over by the very mellow Casey and the severe Sister Assumpta (Jodie Foster) whose moral and personal rigidity is exemplified by her artificial leg. The boys express their rebellion by making obscene drawings of the nun and priest in their notebooks, a pressure valve which works until she confiscates and examines the notebooks.
   The next prank finds the boys and two of their friends stealing a statue from the belfry of the school and holding it for ransom. Along the way, Francis, who narrates the story, finds himself attracted to Margie Flynn (Jena Malone of Donnie Darko), and is torn between an idealistic love and an adolescent lust until she tells him the secret of her family situation.
   The rest of the film involves the boys pushing each other into more and more dangerous pranks until the last one, which is somewhat unbelievable, demonstrates to them how wrong their beliefs of superiority and invulnerability are.
   The acting is good with D'Onofrio and Foster nicely filling roles somewhere between minor and supporting. Emile Hirsch is good as Francis, but Kieran Culkin is excellent as the rebellious Tim who cannot resist pushing the envelope until he has gone too far. The sequence in which the two boys find a badly hurt dog along the side of the road is an outstanding example of Culkin's acting ability as he carries the dog and cries. Malone also is fine as Margie.
   The description so far makes this film sound like a typical teenage-boy-grows-up movie, and in some ways it is, but what makes it memorable is the alternate storyline, a fantasy world of animated comic book superheroes who are alter-egos for the four boys.
   Their adventures protecting a beautiful princess and rescuing a precious jewel parallel in an exaggerated fashion the boys' adventures in the ordinary world. Sister Assumpta becomes, in the comic version, the evil Nunzilla, a motorcycle-riding villainess with a wooden leg who leads a gang of evil nuns.
   The cartoon sequences are drawn by Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn, and they add greatly to the film, taking the audience into the fantasy world of the boys in a way that makes their sometimes foolish acts seem more understandable.
   Sometimes it's easy to forget (or suppress) how much we didn't know at that age, and director Peter Care manages to capture the reckless and fearful quality of adolescence quite well. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys reminds us that adolescence is a dangerous time for everyone, and those who survive often carry deep scars.

   

Igby Goes Down
   Igby Slocumb (Kieran Culkin), the seventeen-year-old protagonist of Igby Goes Down, struck many reviewers as the linear descendent of J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield. And while he has Caulfield's quest for authenticity in what he sees as a hypocritical world, his edgy charm and his exasperating way of alienating those who might help him, he seems a little less sure of his own authenticity than Salinger's hero, and that's not a bad thing.
   Sometimes you feel sorry for him and other times you want to slap him up aside the head, but he didn't get on my nerves as Caulfield did nor was he quite as depressing as Caulfield and his family could be. (Interesting that Salinger's character, popular fifty years ago but long out of fashion, should set the pattern for Igby and be explicitly cited as a role model for Jake Gyllenhaal's mentally disturbed character in The Good Girl.) Some of the other scenes seem to pay homage to The Graduate, although Igby is a darker and more downbeat film.
   The film opens with Igby and his blond preppy brother Oliver (Ryan Phillippe) fitting a plastic bag over the head of their mother, Mimi (Susan Sarandon), who is heavily sedated and snoring, and tying the bag securely around her neck. The rest of the film narrates the events that lead up to this climax. Igby has flunked out of most of the expensive prep schools on the East Coast, and his mother, more disturbed over how this situation embarrasses her than how it affects his education, has enrolled him in a military academy, which she hopes will put him back on the career track that his older brother is pursuing.
   Igby runs away and hides out in the New York loft that belongs to his uncle D. H. (Jeff Goldblum) and that now is occupied by his uncle's mistress, Rachel (Amanda Peet) and her friend, Russell (Jared Harris).
   Rachel is a performance artist, although most of her performances seem to be in bed, and Russell survives by selling drugs, an enterprise in which Igby helps when his own money runs out.
   Add to this mix a girl named Sookie Sapperstein (yes, that's what she answers to), a Bennington dropout played by Claire Danes, who beds first Igby and then his brother Oliver, and the plot thickens -- almost congeals, one might say. Igby accidentally crosses his uncle and pays the consequences; he is pursued by the agents of the military academy; and finally he and Oliver come together in the scene that opens the film.
   Kieran Culkin, who showed surprising talent in Altar Boys (see previous review), is very good here and may be the best actor of the three Culkin boys. He perfectly portrays the irritating quality that such smart, know-it-all high school boys have without losing our sympathy, no small achievement.
   Susan Sarandon has a great time chewing up the scenery as the bitchy Mimi, who tongue lashes even her doctors and has no qualms about slapping her son repeatedly as she walks him down the hall. Goldblum is suave, polished, and vicious, but holds no grudges when he has settled his accounts to his sadistic satisfaction.
   Bill Pullman is touching and befuddled as Igby's father, who became rich and successful and then had a complete nervous breakdown. Igby's visit to the mental hospital is one of the better scenes in the film.
   The film was written and directed by Burr Steers, who is notable in his first directorial effort even though he acknowledges that the plot is somewhat autobiographical. The characters sometimes move too close to caricature, and the film sometimes goes too far, as in the scene in which Oliver watches a blind man fall in the rain and refuses to help him, but overall Igby Goes Down is an impressive first film.

Ratcatcher
   Lynn Ramsey's debut feature film, only recently available in this country, is clearly not for everyone.
   But for those who think film can be more than entertainment; for those who like the films of Truffault, Tarkovsky or Bergman; and for those wanting to discover a powerful new director, Ratcatcher is the film to see. It's clearly one of the most original films of recent years.
   Set in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1973 during a strike of the "dustmen" (garbage collectors), the film takes its title from the thousands of rats that prowl the bags of garbage accumulating in the city streets. Its opening scene portrays an unidentifiable figure wrapped in a white cloth, slowly turning about in front of a window.
   The slow-motion image calls up associations of shrouds (winding sheets), ghosts, even mummies, until a hand reaches into the frame, slaps the figure on the head and orders it out of the curtain in which it has been wrapping itself. Ryan (Thomas McTaggart), a young boy, is told by his mother to go outside and play. He does... and falls into the fetid canal that runs behind the house and drowns. This opening sequence, with its blend of fantasy and brutal reality, sets the tone for Ramsey's film, and it ends with a similar blending of realism and dream imagery.
   Between the opening and closing, the film reveals the world of twelve-year-old James (William Eadie in his first acting role). James holds himself responsible for the death of Ryan (the two had been pushing each other into the water), and his guilt begins to eat away at him as time goes by. James lives with his Ma (Mandy Matthews) and his Da (James Tommy Flanagan) in a run-down apartment house; he shares the small living areas with his sisters, Ellen (Michelle Stewart) and Ann Marie (Lynne Ramsey Jr., daughter of the director).
   James wanders around during the day and meets Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), a girl who finds it easier to let the local toughs have their way with her than to fight them off.
   One of his playmates is Kenny, a mentally confused young boy whom the other kids belittle and who sends his pet white mouse off into the air with its tail tied to a helium-filled balloon. (One of Ramsey's fantasy sequences shows the mouse drifting from the earth to the moon where it lands and dines on green cheese with hundreds of fellow mice.)
   The garbage is everywhere, and thanks to the vermin, all of the children are infected with lice. One especially touching scene shows James and Margaret Anne washing the lice out of each other's hair and then taking a bath together, a scene that has little sexual connotation but which would probably have horrified a U.S. audience.
   The film's weakest aspect is its narrative -- not much happens until the end except that we explore James's world. The film's strengths, which far outweigh its weaknesses, are its powerful acting, its visual images and details, and its honesty that eschews sentimentality.
   Every performance is so realistic that we accept these people as real. Eadie, with his angular face and jug-ears is not a pretty boy, and his father's face bears a huge scar which is never explained. The other children and adults are plain or have faces that Fellini would have liked.
   These characters move through a world in which Ramsey (a still photographer herself) and her cinematographer, Alvin Kuchler, have composed each frame to fit the people, the setting, and Ramsey's eye for detail. In one scene James comes into a darkened room and sees his mother asleep; her foot sticks out from under the covers and her toe protrudes through the hole in the end of her stocking.
   He reaches down and carefully pulls the stocking up until it covers her toe again, and then goes into the next room to sleep. The film's strengths come together in a sequence in which James catches a bus to the end of the line and wanders through an unfinished housing development, looking through windows, sitting in the unconnected tub, and peeing in an unconnected toilet.
   Then, in a beautifully composed shot, he looks across the room and sees a field of golden grain through the window. He climbs out through the window and runs and cavorts through the grain, a dark figure in a heavy coat appearing and disappearing almost like a smudge against the grainfield.
   Later in the film, James returns to the housing development, but now the doors and windows have been installed, and he is as shut out of that facility as he is out of any chance for a better life.
   These scenes linger in the mind long after the film is over, and Rachel Portman's minamalist score (she did the music for The Cider House Rules and Chocolat) is perfect for the few scenes in which the music underlines the lyrical quality of the action.
   The dialogue of Ratcatcher has a very heavy Scottish accent, and many of the idiomatic phrases are not familiar to U. S. viewers; however, the film is subtitled in English for those of us who are Glasgow-dialect impaired.
   Ramsey's 1999 film saw little distribution in the United States, but she did secure funding for her next film in 2002, Morvern Callar, based on a Scottish novel, but again it has, so far at least, received little publicity despite very positive critical response. She has been signed to direct Alice Sebold's bestseller, The Lovely Bones, which was read on "Radio Reader," so perhaps this time Ms. Ramsey will get the distribution and audience her films deserve. Begin following her career now with Ratcatcher.

--Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor's Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

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