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 Post subject: Lou Howe: Gabriel (2014)
PostPosted: Wed Jun 17, 2015 8:02 pm 
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RORY CULKIN IN GABRIEL

Lost boy

Gabriel is a small picture set over the course of a few days in New York and the Hamptons in winter. It wholly focuses on Gabriel (Rory Culkin), a young man quick to anger and as fragile as thin glass who struggles with mental illness. Apparently he has been in a psych ward but is provisionally or temporarily out in the care of his family. He wants to be normal and have a regular life, get married, have children. Gabe's path to this is unrealistic: he wants to reunite with Alice (Emily Meade), a childhood sweetheart he hasn't seen for years. Despite the efforts of his loving mother (Deirdre O'Connell) and Nonny (Lynn Cohen) and his impatient older brother Matthew (David Call), he keeps running off in search of Alice whom, at film's end, he finds. Along the way the path is troubled, irregular, and obsessive. He steals things, he sneaks off, he won't take his meds, his moods shift unpredictably, and he is deeply troubled by the death of his father, who had similar problems, and committed suicide. The beauty of Gabriel is that it does not dramatize or demonize mental illness. Gabe's oddities are subtle, and in Culkin's sensitive and committed performance he is sweet, sad, and appealing. Gabe is a clinical, modernized kind of Holden Caulfield, less well read, more vulgar in his language, equally dreamy, thin-skinned, and elsewhere; and this, like Salinger's book, is a very East Coast tale. But it's a movie, not a novel. We do not get inside his head, yet everything is from his point of view, so the other characters are only glimpsed, one-dimensional. And great and affecting though Culkin is, the action becomes monochromatic. Everyone is good in this, but except for Culkin, they're a little wasted.

Nonetheless Culkin, whom we may remember most for dark comedies like Chumscrubber and Igby Goes Down, is a supple and talented actor who digs into this role with passion. He is this sad-eyed, long-haired, sallow boy in heavy coat and watch cap, and the viewer identifies with him from the start when, on a bus, a parent misinterprets his innocent game of play cigarettes with a child sitting nearby and becomes pointlessly hostile. His brother, a man with a girlfriend, about to pass his bar exams, is impatient and angry when he meets the bus (Gabe didn't catch the one he was supposed to) and superior. His mother, who hugs and hugs him and worries, is nervous and cloying: we can see why he'd want to escape to somebody who would treat him as an equal. Maybe he just needs to go away to college. But thinking that is just being unrealistic, like Gabe. He seems sweet, and intermittently nice, when not angry and protesting, fearful and blaming. But then he runs off looking for Alice, going back and forth because, of course, since he's not in touch with her, he goes to the wrong places. And he seems more and more a lost boy, pursuing a touching but useless search for the wrong things in the wrong places.

Eventually he learns Alice is on winter break from school, and she's at her family's beach house in the Hamptons. But first he escapes to New York City, and once away from quiet and family he begins to seem crazier and more unpredictable. A trip to Joe Jr.'s diner for his favorite hash and egg ends in an abrupt, emotional escape because a ceiling fan has frightened him. He hurts himself and grows paranoid. He grabs knives. He blames his family for his father's death and thinks maybe they should die. He wishes he could die.

As Gabe's family members grow more present and vivid to us, they still remain simply reflections of Gabe's tortured thoughts. The search for Alice does, however, provide the movie with impetus and suspense. When he finds her, it's dramatic, though for him, inevitably a dead end. But alas, well before that the viewer may have concluded this can't go anywhere; and so the movie has become monotonous, even its short 85 minutes pretty long.

Even if people are not going to flock to see it,i]Gabriel[/i] is a feather in the cap for Rory Culkin, an important and demanding role in which he performs with total commitment. It's also a promising feature debut for young director Ron Howe. The cinematography by Wyatt Garfield is appropriately cool and restrained, if it relies a bit too much on big closeups of Culkin's pale cheekbones and sad blue eyes. The string score by Patrick Higgins adds to the tension, but also to the weariness.

Gabriel, 85 mins., debuted at Tribeca 17 April 2014, showing also at Nantucket, the Hamptons, Gothenberg and Leiden. It will be released theatrically in the US by Oscilloscope Friday, 19 June 2015.

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