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The
Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
review by Paula Nechak, 21 June 2002
28th Seattle International Film
Festival
Jodie Foster's
name might lend initial wattage and weight to this coming-of-age
drama directed by Peter Care, but don't
be fooled.
In The
Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys Foster's
company, Egg Pictures, warrants a producer's
credit and yes, that is the actress in a small yet crucial role as a
one-legged nun named Sister Assumpta.
But the brunt
of the film rests in the hands of a troupe of rising young actors,
including Kieran Culkin, Emile Hirsch and Jena Malone, who star in
this odd 70s-based rite-of-passage drama hobbled by a grasp that far
exceeds its precious reach.
It's
the kind of drama that strives to examine the universal experience
but is limited by its quirks (the boys read William Blake, find
symmetry with a zoo cougar after reading
"Tyger,
tyger burning bright...")
and rather specialized milieu and while specificity often does make
for universality, here it feels shoddy and badly crafted instead.
It may be that
director Peter Care's
background in music video disallows for the cohesion and deft touch
and detail that is needed in a story about the confusion and pain
that surround the delicate issues of youthful sexual initiation,
parental fighting and neglect, empowerment and incest.
Best friends
Tim Sullivan (Culkin) and Francis Doyle (Hirsch) are introduced to
us as they prepare to chain saw an old telephone pole, measuring
precisely with a triangle the scope of its fall and the exact spot
of its landing. We immediately understand the relationship - Francis
is the artistic follower and Tim is the rebellious ringleader.
Together they can face the world; apart, their fragility is all too
apparent.
Their tight
knit bond is tested when Francis falls for Margie Doyle (Malone), a
girl with injury in her eyes. Tim and the gang tease Francis but his
crush refuses to subside and he forms a friendship with Margie that
gives him his first taste of real physical intimacy and also ferrets
out a secret that is the basis for her private pain.
Complicate
these quiet and sensitive issues with a Catholic school upbringing,
overseen by strict Sister Assumpta (Foster), who preaches religion
and dogma and yet may have more understanding of their teen torments
than she lets on, and the ground is set for upheaval and desperate
acts which lead to tragedy.
Culkin,
combining his turn in the recent Igby Goes Down, is making
his mark as the tough and troubled, Salinger-esque kid who wants
freedom but hasn't
the wherewithall to handle it and he could sleepwalk his way
through, while Hirsch has a more weighty and difficult part in that
he must convey what he sees, as sidekick to a friend whose character
is all action and little introspection, and act as our moral compass
as well.
And Hirsch,
with his dark, liquid eyes, is quite good. But nearly everything
else is handled clumsily. It's
the silences in this brooding film that mean the most and instead of
allowing for them, Care fills them up with images of superhero comic
book characters, drawn by the boys, patterned upon themselves and
called the Atomic Trinity, to relay the subtext. It might have been
a clever segue tool in the book upon which the film is based, but
here it's
startling, as is the loathing for Sister Assumpta that the boys
feel.
If the point
of the film is subversion - to challenge the worth and impact of
Catholicism on their young lives - and measure how they chafe
against its moral constraints, well, it's
also badly represented. In fact this is a movie that misses almost
all of its many opportunities. What's
left is an unremarkable effort that, on its edges, emits hints of
the possibilities that were left behind. But as soon as it touches
upon them, it drifts into something else, something that is merely
comfortable and less frightening, and instead of the anarchic movie
it wishes to be, is all posture and pose instead.
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