Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 5:07 pm 
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Coming of age between good and evil

Andrew Garfield, an English actor born in LA, has the reedy boyish looks of the young Tony Perkins but without Perkins' edge of craziness. He stood out in the otherwise lackluster Lions for Lambs. As the protagonist of this gritty new movie, Garfield plays a tough role compellingly, grabbing our sympathies even though the guy he plays has a terrible past.His character was complicit in the murder of a young girl at the age of eleven, and has just gotten out after many years of detention. In the opening scenes, Terry (the excellent Peter Mullen), his case-worker and mentor, helps him settle in the north of England, in Manchester, with a job and a new name. He was Eric Mullen. He becomes Jack Burridge. Garfield's sudden bashful smiles in the intense early scenes with Mullen make "Jack" appear to be a remarkably innocent young man--eager to make good.

These scenes between Garfield and Mullen establish sympathy for Jack as a painfully tentative, sensitive, and threatened young man and set a hushed, serious tone. .Jack's overwhelmed by Terry's gift of a new pair of appropriately-named Nike "Escapes," and he doesn't even know how to order a meal at a diner. He's haunted by nightmares and his new room is frighteningly stark. Nonetheless things go unbelievably well for Jack pretty quickly with the job and Michelle. The film puts us in his corner.

Finding a roadside accident while making a delivery with a coworker in his new job, Jack rescues a young girl--dramatically showing off his positive side. He's a hero. It's good publicity for the company too.

But this good deed is dangerous because it gets Jack's picture in the papers. Even though he was tried for his crime anonymously as "Boy A" and in the eyes of the state has been rehabilitated, there are people out there who know Eric Mullen has been released and want to hunt him down. His boss, who's aware he was in prison but not what for, has assured him on his first day at work that everybody deserves a second chance. But the truth is, for some crimes, people throw that rule away. No second chances for what the tabloids call a "monster." The mainstream media seems to altogether reject this young man's right to a new identity. Not everyone believes in rehabilitation.

Besides which Jack must struggle to hide his complete ignorance of non-institutional life. All at once he must learn to work an ordinary job, hang out with coworkers and party with them on the weekend; and hardest of all, when a woman at work called Michelle (Katie Lyons) takes an immediate liking to him, he must handle dating, sex, and a serious relationship.

Meanwhile periodic flashbacks pull us back to Eric's dark early years. His abusive father swills whiskey in front of the TV and his mother is withdrawn, dying of breast cancer upstairs. He's a shy outsider. Seeking comfort from the bullies around school who hound him, he becomes friends with a nasty, more confident boy called Philip (an effective Taylor Doherty), a kid long sexually abused by his own brother, who teaches Eric petty thievery. While Jack's getting closer to Michelle, we're getting closer to the young Eric, though the actual crime he and Philip committed isn't shown till near the film's end.

The scenes with Michelle navigate a nice line between the matter of fact and the achingly sincere as in early encounters Jack goes too far, can't perform, and then is intensely excited. Lyons conveys Michelle's experience along with her appreciation of Jack's naive warmth and sweetness. Again he is overwhelmed when she gives him a nice present. Then when they both declare their love, he aches to tell her the truth about himself. It seems a betrayal not to. But Terry, whom Jack calls whenever he's in need of advice, assures him he cannot.

Crowley, who won a Tony for his direction of Martin McDonagh's brilliant play The Pillowman, gets uniformly fine performances from the cast and Rob Hardy does fine, atmospheric camera-work that conveys a sense of the gritty north that may recall Corbijn's Control.

The film is well edited but may seem to move too fast. As was true of native Irishman Crowley's Dublin film Intermission, the dialog is hard to follow at times--for an American anyway. Some plot elements, such as the highway rescue, and Terry's no-account son who becomes a contrast to Jack, are a little obvious. Boy A becomes a bit of a thriller at the end and its direction feels rather deterministic. The film isn't meant to be about action but states of mind and degrees of moral certainty.. Luckily the acting feels so immediate that we're not left with any sense of being manipulated. Though this hero comes from a darker place, we're firmly in Ken Loach territory, and the able Mullen in fact has worked well for Loach himself.

This quietly powerful English film presents serious moral and practical issues. If a criminal has served his time, does he deserve a new life? How can he achieve that anyway? In a small country like England, it's not easy to hide. Distances may not be long enough to outrun one's past. To what emotional lengths must one go to be safe under such circumstances? At 24, is a full life forever to be denied because of an act at the age of 11? Mark O'Rowe's screenplay, adapted from Jonathan Tribell's 2004 novel--itself loosely based on the experiences of Mary Bell and the Bulger killers--can't altogether sidestep the source book's manipulativeness. But what it can do in compensation is present splendid performances and a realistic feel that leave viewers troubled and pensive rather than brainwashing them.

Garfield delivers a breakout performance and he's already received a BAFTA award for it (the film was originally shown on British television). He deserves to be remembered when other awards are given out this year, and we're sure to be seeing more of him.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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