Dave's Other Movie Log

davesothermovielog.com

Articles  Contents  Reviews  Guestbook

L.I.E.**

The scenario that comes decked out with a layer of parapsychological varnish in Hearts in Atlantis appears in its more secular incarnation in L.I.E., directed by Michael Cuesta, as the tale of a sensitive adolescent male going through an identity crisis with recognizably sexual features. Sixteen year old Howie Blitzer (Paul Franklin Dano) lives on Long Island--the film's title is an acronym for Long Island Expressway--with his recently widowed father Marty (Bruce Altman), a sleazy contractor who is given to bringing his lady friends in for the evening to his son's dismay. One night he and a friend break into the basement of the house of Big John Harrigan (Brian Cox), a retired Marine who is celebrating a birthday party on that evening. When the boys inadvertently cause a racket below, Big John comes after them.

As it turns out, Howie's friend Gary (Billy Kay) knows more about Big John than he's letting on. In fact, it might be said that the boy "knows" Big John in the sense in which the word was used by the translators of the the King James Bible, apparently having tricked with him several times in the past. Although Big John fails to capture the boys on that occasion, he's ripped off a piece of Howie's pants that he saves as evidence as well as a fetish that he sniffs--shades of King Kong!--while out cruising the neighborhood. The older man, suspecting an inside job, first confronts the deviously unreliable Gary with his suspicions and then goes after his unknown accomplice. 

Persisting in his search, Big John finally corners the far less experienced Howie and threatens to prosecute the boy for the theft of a pair of revolvers the youths have stolen unless Howie consents to submit to oral sex with him--for those in the audience with sufficiently dirty minds, the "BJ" which appears on Big John's license plate will undoubtedly suggest something other than just his nickname. In the meantime, unfortunately, Gary takes off for the West Coast with money he has stolen on the sly from Howie's father, and Howie finds himself in worse trouble than he has ever had to face in his brief life.  

It would be perversely tempting, but misleading to state that L.I.E. gives the lie to Hearts in Atlantis. But in the latter movie, the shadow of pedophilia only lurks in the the dirty minds of the others, not in the innocent heart of Bobby nor in the hermetically sealed-off soul of the saintly Ted. Yet L.I.E. presents if anything an even sourer view of adult sexuality than that of Hearts in Atlantis, particularly in a sequence at the beginning that shows Marty banging--the most appropriate word--his lady companion for the evening, an interlude with all the erotic charge of a scene of elephants copulating in an instructional movie made for high school biology classes.

L.I.E. is another contribution to the corpus of movies which expose the skeletons lurking in the closets of middle class America, one that includes American Beauty and Happiness--and L.I.E. has a violent denouement just as strained as American Beauty's and even more dramatically dubious. The film eliminates the disturbing question of what to do with a "sympathetic" child molester by having an angry discarded lover blast Big John as he sits waiting in his car at his favorite cruising spot. What keeps Happiness afloat is the remorseless irony with which Todd Solondz regards his impaled subjects squirming on a cinematic pin, but no ray of irony, let alone humor, ever penetrates into the pretentious murk of L.I.E. Even the insufferably silly Chuck and Buck has far better moments than anything that transpires on the screen while the action of this movie unfolds.

Like so many recent independently produced films, the film has a concept that is far more arresting than its realization. L.I.E. is not unified in either tone or style, veering off in a number of directions at once. Worst of all, the film tries to make a statement about the hollowness of contemporary American consumerist culture by throwing in a highly dispensable subplot about some illegal shenanigans which result in Howie's father being suddenly arrested and sent to prison. The mise en scène is virtually non-existent and seems dictated more by the budget than by aesthetic considerations. There is not one shot--not even the one of Howie precariously walking on the railing of the bridge over Long Island Expressway--that stands out at all. The cinematography by Romeo Tirone is purely functional as is the editing by Eric Carlson and Kane Platt. The film's most conspicuous asset lies in its performances, but especially Brian Cox's turn as Big John and Paul Franklin Dano's as Howie.

L.I.E. has one basic shtick going for it: depicting a pedophile who is a gung-ho, gregarious, macho male rather than a maniac recognizable from miles away. No doubt the movie deserves credit for avoiding stereotyping, but having made this timid step forward it has no idea where to go next. The screenwriters--Stephan M. Ryder and Michael and Gerald Cuesta--must have been absent from class the day character development was discussed. In fact, it might have been more interesting to have explored Big John as an embodiment of the "mysterious stranger" who haunts many a neighborhood--the equivocal unmarried older male who has a magnetic attraction for adolescent boys--than as a retired Marine, although he is mercifully far removed from the psychopathic next door neighbor in American Beauty.

L.I.E. has what older reviewers would euphemistically refer to as an "offbeat" subject. While I'm happy that Cuesta wants to present Big John as a rounded character rather than a cardboard villain, ultimately the movie's biggest failure lies in not being bizarre enough. What the film needs to imitate is not Elia Kazan's East of Eden or Nicholas Ray's Rebel without a Cause, but The Strange Ones, the great adaptation of Jean Cocteau's novel Les Enfants terribles (1950), directed by Jean-Melville in collaboration with Cocteau. Being willing to take risks is the only possible justification for a project like this. Otherwise, the old cliche about letting sleeping dogs--or child molesters--lie still holds true. 

The Strange Ones is available on video from Amazon.com

Production data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database

Home

E-mail Dave: daveclayton@worldnet.att.net