Published on Cinescene.

Studies in the art of emulation

In Son of Rambow, a bully and a shy imaginative kid at a country English school in the early Eighties team up to remake Stallone's first Rambo movie First Blood. The result is an appealingly casual picture of some of the joys and sorrows of childhood--blood brotherhood, school crushes, coming to terms with your family. Jenning's movie is a little too like the video the kids are shooting: it's pretty rough around the edges and it makes itself up as it goes along, and it hardly has anyplace original to go. Still, there's an understated Englishness about the whole thing that feels comfortable from the first frame and suits the world it depicts.

Well-behaved Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) belongs to a fatherless family allied with a bossy religious cult called The Brethren. Things are grim at home and he's not allowed to watch TV even in class. His mother (Jessica Stevenson) is taking more and more cues from would-be father figure Joshua (Neil Dudgeon), putting even more pressure on him to conform as news of his cinematic exploits slips out. But early on Will reveals a highly developed imagination; he covers a textbook with remarkable and endless drawings that look like Outsider Art.

In his secret world Will's a superhero already, so when tough-talking classroom hellion Lee Carter (Will Poulter) commandeers him to star in his video, he's quite willing to swing out over the river on a vine even though he can't swim. Lee's secret is that though his surroundings seem posh at the house adjoining a rest home his mother's boyfriend owns, Mum is off in Spain all the time and he's left to his own devices with exploitive and coldhearted older brother Lawrence (Ed Westwick), whose oversize video camera Lee's incidentally snitching. Lawrence's constant phone calls to the Continent on one of those even more preposterously outsized early Eighties cell phones show he's none to happy about being left alone himself.

Along come some French visiting students including the skinny, stylish Didier (Jules Sitruk), who behaves and dresses like a racy, haughty rock star. Didier is a droll creation, somehow endearing despite being a parody of both French snobbism and schoolboy poseurs. From the moment he steps off the bus in his little red boots grandly announcing his arrival to all of England, he instantly acquires a claque of slavish boy and girl admirers. Winningly, he turns out to be a loner and misfit too, and he eagerly joins in the filmmaking; but then he and his posse spoil things for "Colonel Carter" (Lee).

Will's dare-devil stunts as a pint-sized Rambo are over the top, but his loyalty to Lee is believable and so is his hitherto unknown boldness. While Lee's tough-guy act worked in dealing with the school hierarchy, he's upstaged when the pliable Will pogos to Depeche Mode at a party of space dust snorting punkers. The DIY film project becomes an expression of various personal conflicts, Will and Lee have a falling out that's resolved in the last reel, and Lee earns decent treatment at last from the churlish Lawrence.

A distributor paid $8 million for this little film at Sundance, a move the Variety reviewer thought unwise. It probably was, but a film doesn't have to be well or expensively made to earn a following. With its offhandedness and many original little touches, Son of Rambow is to be cherished for its understated charm and will probably be guaranteed many years of happy home viewing. This time Jennings is relaxed and avoids the arch over-elaborateness of his last film, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. One thing I particularly liked was the typically throw-away lines of the classroom teacher, whose rap is low-keyed, sophisticated, unselfconscious and funny in ways one can't imagine an American film achieving no matter how hard it might try. This movie has its extravagant moments but trying too hard is something it never does, though despite its haphazard quality, it ties up its many themes almost too neatly at the end.

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