Boy A
Directed by John Crowley
Over-stylized and under-thought, Boy A ruins its simple story of a young man in Manchester, England, trying to escape a grievous youthful error. Jack Burridge (Andrew Garfield) takes a new name when released from the prison where he spent his teen years serving time for manslaughter. As Jack’s parole officer, Terry (Peter Mullan), tries to ease his transition, director John Crowley films their face-to-face as a series of stark silhouettes and then cuts to huge profiles—often leaving large blank spaces on screen. Crowley ignores the content to design a fancy surface.
Problem is, Jack’s loner dilemma should inspire sympathy; but Crowley’s unoriginal form blocks it. Compositions frequently have blurred edges, redundantly compounding Jack’s inner turmoil and confusion. Flashbacks to his loveless pre-adolescence show Jack was always shy; now he’s pathologically so. Garfield plays Jack with neurotic mannerisms reminiscent of Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates (as well as Jonathan Davies’ neo-Perkins nervousness) so that the film becomes a study of quirky alienation. This was already better achieved in The Wackness where Jonathan Levine used Josh Peck’s hip-hop infatuation to create a universally recognizable romantic mood. But Boy A dishonors the tradition of such socially focused British character studies as Basil Dearden’s 1958 juvenile-delinquent classic Violent Playground (a forerunner of Dog Day Afternoon) that examined teenage sadism. Boy A turns that into an attenuated, solipsistic gloss.
Case-in-point: Young Jack’s only friend is Philip (Taylor Doherty), the psychotic bully who led him into murder. Philip confides his at-home sexual abuse. (“I just think of rooms with hundreds of doors. They keep closing. If I can keep from crying ‘til all of them close, then it won’t hurt. And it does.”) Crowley shoots this in a distant overhead shot that stylizes the two youths as the only boys on the planet, rather than getting in close to their personal confidence and anxiety. This is bad cinema. As Philip’s speech suggests, it’s also appallingly literary—an affectation that keeps Boy A from conveying believable working-class atmosphere and tension. When adult Jack defends a co-worker from thugs, his vicious outburst goes past personal instability and beyond punk rebellion into Crowley’s stylized brutality. (Should this brutality reflect Jack’s youthful crime?)
Boy A is so excessively mannered that the story’s human element (misunderstood youth, society’s indifference) is lost. Jack can’t find love or friendship—only distrust and betrayal. His childhood susceptibility to murder (huh?) turns inward and self-destructive. He tries escaping, hobbling across railroad tracks, which unfortunately recalls the ghoulish train-tracks murder in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, rather than the revelation of social and psychological oppression that distinguished Jean Renoir’s railroad drama La Bete Humaine. This blurring of cinematic-literary conceits is ruining movies, transforming complex life into grotesque high-mindedness: from Little Children, Mysterious Skin, The Life Before Her Eyes to Snow Angels, Paranoid Park, etc. It’s no surprise Boy A comes from a novel by Jonathan Trigell who, the film’s press kit says, “completed an MA in novel writing at Manchester University and now lives in the French Alps.” That must be Jack’s destination; Crowley’s too
Directed by John Crowley
Over-stylized and under-thought, Boy A ruins its simple story of a young man in Manchester, England, trying to escape a grievous youthful error. Jack Burridge (Andrew Garfield) takes a new name when released from the prison where he spent his teen years serving time for manslaughter. As Jack’s parole officer, Terry (Peter Mullan), tries to ease his transition, director John Crowley films their face-to-face as a series of stark silhouettes and then cuts to huge profiles—often leaving large blank spaces on screen. Crowley ignores the content to design a fancy surface.
Problem is, Jack’s loner dilemma should inspire sympathy; but Crowley’s unoriginal form blocks it. Compositions frequently have blurred edges, redundantly compounding Jack’s inner turmoil and confusion. Flashbacks to his loveless pre-adolescence show Jack was always shy; now he’s pathologically so. Garfield plays Jack with neurotic mannerisms reminiscent of Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates (as well as Jonathan Davies’ neo-Perkins nervousness) so that the film becomes a study of quirky alienation. This was already better achieved in The Wackness where Jonathan Levine used Josh Peck’s hip-hop infatuation to create a universally recognizable romantic mood. But Boy A dishonors the tradition of such socially focused British character studies as Basil Dearden’s 1958 juvenile-delinquent classic Violent Playground (a forerunner of Dog Day Afternoon) that examined teenage sadism. Boy A turns that into an attenuated, solipsistic gloss.
Case-in-point: Young Jack’s only friend is Philip (Taylor Doherty), the psychotic bully who led him into murder. Philip confides his at-home sexual abuse. (“I just think of rooms with hundreds of doors. They keep closing. If I can keep from crying ‘til all of them close, then it won’t hurt. And it does.”) Crowley shoots this in a distant overhead shot that stylizes the two youths as the only boys on the planet, rather than getting in close to their personal confidence and anxiety. This is bad cinema. As Philip’s speech suggests, it’s also appallingly literary—an affectation that keeps Boy A from conveying believable working-class atmosphere and tension. When adult Jack defends a co-worker from thugs, his vicious outburst goes past personal instability and beyond punk rebellion into Crowley’s stylized brutality. (Should this brutality reflect Jack’s youthful crime?)
Boy A is so excessively mannered that the story’s human element (misunderstood youth, society’s indifference) is lost. Jack can’t find love or friendship—only distrust and betrayal. His childhood susceptibility to murder (huh?) turns inward and self-destructive. He tries escaping, hobbling across railroad tracks, which unfortunately recalls the ghoulish train-tracks murder in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, rather than the revelation of social and psychological oppression that distinguished Jean Renoir’s railroad drama La Bete Humaine. This blurring of cinematic-literary conceits is ruining movies, transforming complex life into grotesque high-mindedness: from Little Children, Mysterious Skin, The Life Before Her Eyes to Snow Angels, Paranoid Park, etc. It’s no surprise Boy A comes from a novel by Jonathan Trigell who, the film’s press kit says, “completed an MA in novel writing at Manchester University and now lives in the French Alps.” That must be Jack’s destination; Crowley’s too
