ETHAN DIXON AND SKYLAN BROOKS IN THE INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF MISTER & PETE

How they spent the summer

In this heartbreaking little movie two boys, the scrawny African-American Mister (Skylan Brooks) and the tiny Korean Pete (Ethan Dixon), survive alone together in Mister's apartment through a hot summer in the Brooklyn projects after their mothers disappear, navigating a stark and dangerous world alone to avoid being nabbed by child protective services and put into a scary big local foster care center. The hard knocks start right away when Mister gets an F on a paper, which means he's flunking English, which means he will not go on to high school and will have to repeat the eighth grade. At home, his addict mom Gloria (Jennifer Hudson) is shooting up. She makes him take care of Pete, whose mom is another addict who, judging by a brief glimpse of her on the street, is in an even worse state than Gloria. Both women are in thrall to the local drug boss-pimp with a mohawk and three brawny sidekicks, Kris (Anthony Mackie). Later the cops burst in looking for drugs and to the terror of Pete and Mister, hiding in a bedroom, she is arrested and taken away. They expect her to be released and return, but the summer sizzles on and she doesn't.

When I tell you that a bum on the street called Henry is played by Jeffrey Wright, you may begin to gather that the cast here is top notch. My only beef with the involving screenplay by Michael Starrbury is that it's a tad obvious and contains truisms. Maybe we need to hear them again in this context. The effort is to maintain the kids' point of view. For them, "You can't help loving your mom but you don't have to like her," or "I can't do this alone..." "None of us can" would be truths worth pondering. There is the danger of a cuteness factor. Mister is a little flyweight macho man. He says Fuck you to his teacher, and goes right up and challenges Kris. He defies the hostile Indian convenience store owner (Kenneth Maharaj) and wrecks his store. That may not sound cute, but his self-reliance and dreams are adorable, and Pete is vulnerable and sweet.

Mister & Pete is a mixture and much is far from merely cute. Probably you would not take young kids to see this, but it shows what these kids and many like them have to see, like Gloria not only shooting up, but later in a restaurant toilet giving a blow job to earn money to pay for the meal she takes Mister and Pete for when her welfare card has run out of cash and Mister can't get any food from the Indian's shop.

There is a pretty, rather large woman called Alice (Jordin Sparks) who has made it out of the projects but remembers how kind Mister was to her and tries to do him good turns. His need to put on a tough front makes that hard. If she's selling herself too, it's on a higher level than Gloria. She's having an affair with a married white man and he asks her to live with him. She may have a nice job -- that's not clear, but while Mister runs to her in his direst need, he distrusts her, but he also kisses her.

Mister has guts and dreams. He wants to become an actor and has his eye on a casting call for a TV show that will shoot in Beverly Hills. He does impressions and loves the Coens' Fargo and recites bits from it with spirit. This is the movie's fresh angle but seems like the pathetic fantasy people in hopeless situations cling to, in stories anyway. Here again, the screenplay does not stray from convention.

This movie invites comparison with Hirakasu Koreeda's 2004 film Nobody Knows. The basic theme (also found in other films, such as The Cement Garden) is the same one of kids whose parents have disappeared but who try to hide the fact and survive on their own to avoid foster care. The milieus are very different, Brooklyn projects vs. an ordinary Japanese urban neighborhood where people don't know each other very well. It's relatively easy for Koreeda's brood to hide in their apartment when their irresponsible mom has vanished. The Brooklyn ghetto is a cruel world but not such an anonymous one. Especially since it's summer the street life is constant. The cops are circling around and besides Henry, there's Dip Stick (Julito McCullum), who to avoid prosecution for local petty burglaries squeals on the boys for avoiding the authorities.

Both movies are deeply sad stories of devolution as the kids' options in each case gradually run out. They begin to starve and get sick and the gas and electricity are cut off and their surrender and discovery become, as Dip Stick has warned, "inevitable." (Dip Stick uses the word, and Mister looks it up, showing that learning is flowing here.) Koreeda's film may have an aesthetic advantage through its greater narrative austerity, but Tillman's is a richer social portrait. The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete has a tidy, cute ending. After all he has gone through, his mom in rehab has gotten him and Mister is back in that eighth grade class with the same teacher and the title of the movie is the title of the paper Mister writes in the first day of class on the classic theme, "What I Did Last Summer." Tidy and cute, but Starbury and Tillman, to their credit, do not resort to any magic to save the boys from their tough lives. Pete is still in the foster home and Mister is still in the eighth grade. Mister & Pete is larger than it at first appears, seeming larger through how it's consistently observed from the viewpoint of two small boys.

The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete, 108 mins., debuted at Sundance and showed at some other US festivals. It began limited US release 11 Oct. 2013. Screened for this review at Angelika Film Center, NYC.

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