BEAUTIFUL BOY: a sadly empty response to a terrible tragedy

BEAUTIFUL BOY is a story ripped from today's headlines yet rarely told.
With the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres very firmly in mind director Shawn Ku examines the aftermath of a mass shooting at a US university from the point of view of the devastated parents of the teenage shooter.

Bill (Michael Sheen) and Kate (Maria Bello) start to fear the worst after they hear of the shooting and can't get hold of their son Sammy on the phone. When police arrive at their front door they're already braced for bad news but nothing can prepare them for being told that Sammy is the one responsible for the murder of 17 classmates and professors.   
Within hours the press are camped out on their front lawn and the couple are forced to flee their home and take refuge with Kate's brother and his wife. What follows is a faux fly-on-the-wall style study of a couple trying and failing to come to terms with the enormity of the death of their only son and his inexplicable slaughter of so many innocent people. It's a process made more complicated by the fact that Bill and Kate are a couple on the verge of separation. Physically they're together but emotionally there's an enormous gulf between them and it's only been made wider by this terrible event.
What I found so unfortunate about BEAUTIFUL BOY is that the coldness and distance between Bill and Kate spilled over into my response to them. The film has a chilly, clinical look and feel that evokes only emotional numbness. There was no sense of sharing in the horror of Sammy's actions, or his parents inability to find the appropriate reaction. Both of them went from moments of steely resolve to complete collapse but the impression was of observing a clinical study. Ku's insistence on having his camera continually moving to mimic the motion of a hand-held camera objectively documenting events as they occur merely adds to this impression and may induce motion sickness in some viewers.
In a time when the media is quick to craft often simplistic explanations for horrific, complex and sometimes inexplicable events, and even quicker to apportion blame (often equally inaccurately) BEAUTIFUL BOY serves as a sombre reality check, reminding us that those closest to the perpetrator can be left just as devastated as the families of his victims, with the additional burden of guilt and confusion over what caused their loved one to go off the rails and whether they are somehow responsible.
Grim and understandably depressing as BEAUTIFUL BOY is, my ultimate response was only disappointment at its failure to move me.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS: Woody's magical time machine tour

Woody Allen is back!

I know he never went away but it's certainly seemed as if his incredible talent has deserted him in recent years. It's been painful to watch his last few films - 'Cassandra's Dream', 'WhateverWorks', 'You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger' - each one worse than the last and barely a distant flicker of the comedic genius that gave us 'Manhattan', 'Broadway Danny Rose', 'Zelig', 'Hannah and Her Sisters' et al.

I never gave up on him but I was resigned to never seeing their like again. And then I watched MIDNIGHT IN PARIS.

This is a film to fall in love with. A beautiful, funny and touching romantic comedy expertly played out by a cast that look like they’re having fun. And why wouldn’t they be? Allen’s script is deliciously light and fluffy. He’s rediscovered his muse and she has filled his head with dialogue that’s the aural equivalent of a Magnum Double Caramel Ice Cream Bar.

Owen Wilson stars as Gil, a successful, self confessed “Hollywood hack” who yearns to break the shackles of his day job to write a novel. In Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents Gil is overcome with the romanticism of the city and dreams of living in the Paris of the 1920s which he imagines to be a golden age. Then one night, just as the clock strikes twelve a slightly drunk Gil is invited into a big old car and finds himself transported back to a time when F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Cole Porter made the French capital their playground.

Gil’s disbelieving pleasure at encountering his literary heroes is balanced by his even more disbelieving and disinterested fiancée and future parents-in-law who are presented as the worst kind of ugly Americans – tastelessly wealthy and dismissive of any culture that isn’t their own. Their response to Gil’s challenging of their values is to brand him a communist.

Ever since Allen stopped acting in his own films and retreated behind the camera he’s had one of the cast play the part that he would have played were he still acting. In many cases that actor has come across as little more than a weak impression of the great man. Wilson takes on that part in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS but completely avoids falling into the trap. By the time I realised that Gil was the Woody Allen part I had fully committed to Gil as a character in his own right and didn’t see him as simply channelling Allen. The credit for that belongs to Wilson’s interpretation of the role and his impressive ability to make Allen’s lines sound like his own.

And there are some very funny lines. My particular favourite is the scene where Gil encounters the young and not yet famous surrealist film maker Luis Bunuel and pitches the confused Spaniard a plot for what will become one of his most famous films but which in 1920 is just incomprehensible nonsense. Is this Allen having a dig at pretentious film making or just making his own wonderfully surreal joke? Either way it’s a scene to be savoured.

As ever the cast is filled with big names eager to appear in an Allen movie. Among the stand-outs here are Michael Sheen as a pedantic smug know-it-all who insists on providing a running commentary on every tourist attraction and work of art that Gil, Ynez and the ‘rents take in; Adrien Brody as a rhinoceros obsessed Salvador Dali; Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein and Marion Cotillard as Adriana, Picasso’s latest muse and the object of Gil’s desires.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is an instant classic. You’ll lose yourself in the sweet and funny fantasy played out against a French capital dipped in golden hues, and then you’ll go on line and book yourself a holiday to Paris.