Beautiful Boy

mandy — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Shawn Ku

Considering how common the tragedy of school shootings has become in our society, it is strange how infrequently this phenomena appears on both the silver and the TV screen. Perhaps this is because understanding these incidents is difficult, even when it comes to fiction. In Beautiful Boy, director Shawn Ku attempts to explore unanswerable questions by depicting a married couple who are torn apart by the death of their son, a college student who is both the victim and culprit of a massively fatal school shooting.

Maria Bello and Micheal Sheen play Kate and Eric, a married couple on the brink of separation. Despite living in the same home, the two move in completely separate spheres: eating dinner apart, sleeping in separate beds, and conversing with one another from different rooms. Their coldness to one another seems to have spread to their sole child, Sam (Kyle Gallner), who is attending college away from home.

Beautiful Boy opens with Sam reading a short story aloud, sadly recalling a long gone happy memory of his family at the beach. Eyes large and heavy with sadness, he calls his family from his dorm room and tries to communicate his frustration. His parents, however, are completely distracted by their own troubles, and unable to register his need for help.

The next morning the couple’s routine is interrupted by news of the shooting at Sam's school. Panicked, Kate fruitlessly attempts to get in touch with Sam. When the police finally come to their door, Kate and Eric learn that the truth is more terrible than even their greatest fear: not only is Sam dead but he is the sole perpetrator of the shooting.

With the media waiting on their doorstep, and the phone ringing incessantly, the two find themselves unable to carry on with their normal lives. Unsure of who to turn to and where to go, Kate and Eric walk away from what they knew. At first this tragedy seems to push Kate and Eric further apart, but eventually it's the only thing big enough to hold the couple together.

The question that haunts Kate and Eric, and no doubt the parents of real-life shooters, is how they could have created a child capable of carrying out such an unspeakable act. The two are forced to face this question amid intermittent snippets of television footage showing their son explaining his actions. Defying cliche, Sam is never made out to be overly angry or monstrous; rather, he is shown to be a boy ripped apart by the seemingly bleak world around him.

In the end, it is the raw and unsettling internal examination of a disjointed couple’s struggle to reunite in the midst of an an overwhelming crisis that is the sole focus of this film. Bello and Sheen give incredible, understated, and emotionally bare performances in which they portray the anguish of their characters without seeming overly dramatic. Both prove themselves to be immensely gifted actors, skilled at lending realism and believability to the most unbelievable of moments.

Written by: Adrienne Urbanski, March 13th 2011

City Island

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Raymond De Felitta

Anchor Bay Films

The film City Island is no more about City Island of the Bronx than Chinatown is about the Chinatown of Los Angeles. Let me be clear. City Island clangs loudly around in the china shop of classical drama allusions, the acting world, Italian American stereotypes, blue collar romanticism, more than one film homage, the gung-ho desire to leave its audience feeling all is well, what Kenneth Burke considered the role of comedy, and a huge helping of "New York, New York." Unemployment, the erosion of blue collar jobs, and the gentrification of New York’s waterfront communities like Red Hook, Greenpoint, and Hoboken—of which City Island itself could be emblematic—do not appear in this movie.

The juxtaposition of the Manhattan skyline and the "authentic" working class neighborhood evokes cinema history (On the Waterfront, Manhattan), not present-day urban reality. Manhattan remains the dream. Indeed, we get the money shots, and the view from Roosevelt Island is definitely a refreshing change from the Brooklyn Promenade. City Island is more about metaphor than it is the challenged metropolis.

The movie is about Vince Rizzo (played by Andy Garcia, who is a producer of the film) and his secret dream of becoming an actor, which he keeps from his wife and two children. He also has another secret: before his marriage he fathered a son, whose mother he abandoned before the boy was born. In the course of Vince’s job as a corrections officer, he realizes a prisoner, who cannot be paroled because there is no family member to release him to, is his son (Steven Strait). Vince’s acting lessons, which he hides with the excuse that he is playing poker, have convinced his wife (Julianna Margulies) that he is having an affair, particularly since their relationship has degenerated into loud domestic bickering. Misunderstandings, inappropriate pairings, and revelations ensue, with a happier ending than any character or viewer has a right to expect.

Yet, there is grist for the feminist mill in this lighthearted paean one of New York's ethnic enclaves: family über alles, an off-kilter salute to the beauty of big women, and a couple of convenient kick-the-woman-to-the-curb plot contrivances. The secrets and white lies the plot makes much of are all secrets kept from the family by individual members of it, not family secrets kept from all but the most affected member, which are, in my experience, the most troubling ones. The dreams deferred are all individual dreams—college is the big one for both father Vince and adult daughter (Dominik Garcia-Lorido, who is Garcia’s daughter in real life). The capacious family accepts not only the convicted felon love child, but also the teenage son’s fat lady fetish, indulged by the very generous next-door neighbor (Carrie Baker Reynolds), a professional big, beautiful woman with a commercial website. For me this smacked of tokenism to make up for the pole dancing of Rizzo's daughter and the excessive beefcake of Steven Strait's character.

Feminists might cringe at how conveniently the very bad mother myth—“a drunkard and a whore,” says her own son—is used to justify Rizzo’s youthful conduct. I was more disturbed by the dispatch with which the delightful Emily Mortimer was whisked out of the picture, essentially, for putting her own dream ahead of maternal responsibilities. She should be happy for helping the male lead realize his, an outcome that is itself one hundred percent “dollar and a dream” lottery culture.

That said, director-and-writer Raymond De Felitta has crafted an intricate, allusive, and subtle script into a funny, enjoyable movie that most feminists can finish without experiencing too much discomfort.

Written by: Frances Chapman, March 18th 2010