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