Dir.
Michael Cuesta, USA, 2005, 91 mins
Cast: Conor Donovan, Jesse Camacho, Zoe Weizenbaum, Jeremy
Renner
Review by Carol Allen
The opening of
this film is truly shocking. Rudy (Donovan) and his friend
Leonard (Camacho) are trapped in a tree house, when it is
burned down by a local bully, whom the boys and Rudy's twin
brother Jacob (also Donovan) have upset. Rudy is killed,
Leonard survives but loses his sense of taste. Jacob, who
is already emotionally withdrawn because of a disfiguring
birth mark on his face, survives only because he chickened
out at the last moment from joining the others in their overnight
escapade. This all conspires to consolidate his belief that
he is less loved by his parents than his perfect brother,
as he is left to cope with their grief and fury at the light
sentence the perpetrators of the crime receive. Cut to a
year or so later, when Jacob, Leonard and their best friend
Malee (Weizenbaum) are 12 years old, still children needing
their parents' love and guidance but starting to feel the
adventurous urges of adolescence.
The way they express these urges is sometimes funny and touching,
sometimes alarming. Malee for example, who is badly in need
of a father figure, becomes fixated on Gus Maitland (Jeremy
Renner), a former firefighter, who is being treated for depression
by her bitter and divorced psychotherapist mother Carla (Annabella
Sciorra). It starts out as a sweet childhood crush, which
then becomes disturbing, when she starts to ape the adults
she sees on television by wearing provocative clothes and
make up in a clumsy attempt to seduce him. Leonard, who comes
from a gross but loving family of junk-food eaters, is the
school joke for his obesity, until a teacher takes him under
his wing and introduces him to healthy food and exercise.
The sequence where Leonard locks his mother in the cellar
to force her to diet is initially very comic, until the situation
again takes a dark and dangerous turn. Meanwhile Jacob has
taken to visiting Kenny (Michael Fuchs), one of the boys
who killed his twin, in the correction centre. Initially
he releases his feelings by shouting at the older boy about
the terrible revenge he is going to take on him, but then
a wary friendship develops between Jacob and the otherwise
totally rejected and friendless Kenny.
Apart from Renner, who gives a very
interesting performance as a young man trying his best
to deal with the difficult situation he finds himself in
with Malee, and Marcia Debonis as Grace, Leonard's mother,
who feels rejected by her son, when he refuses to eat the
fattening meals she has so lovingly prepared, the adults,
who also include Linus Roache as Jacob's father, are a
bit underused. In view of the fact that one of the main
points of the film is about children’s
need for the love of their parents and what happens when
they don't feel they have it, I would have liked to have
seen more of the sort of interaction between child and parent
that we do get with Leonard and Grace. The child actors are
very good but the film doesn't always engage dramatically
as much as it should. The climax of the relationship between
Jacob and Kenny for example, which should have been as shocking
as the opening, somehow doesn’t have the same impact.
It is however an interesting and worthwhile film.
DVD RELEASE: March 12 2007, £19.99,
Lionsgate Home Entertainment
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