Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
7/22/08
Fault writer/director Garth
Jennings (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) for a lot of things,
but don't fault him for not trying to make the Greatest Movie of All Time.
Son of Rambow is about a lot of things, a LOT of things: the
fantasy world of childhood, the conflict between orthodox religion and
popular culture, the unjust social order of high school, the purity of
friendship, and most of all, the way the movies reflect, inspire, and re-enforce
the world in which we live. Whew! At some of those goals, Jennings'
film is a brilliant success. At others, it is a disastrous failure.
But Son of Rambow is never dull, and at its' best (and, more importantly,
last) it's a lot of fun and quite touching.
It's the summer of 1982.
British schoolmates Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and Lee Carter (Will Poulter)
couldn't be more different. Will's family is part of a religious
order that forbids all modern media, even lame-o educational films in school.
So, he sits out in the hall while they're shown, and there he meets perpetual
truant Lee, being raised by his brother (Ed Westwick) into a life of petty
crime. Lee cons the gullible Will into doing him assorted favors,
and in the process of one, the kid who's never seen a movie ends up watching
a bootleg copy of First Blood. His imagination is already
begging for release, with a notebook full of wild drawings and stories,
and the killing machine John Rambo is just the hero he needs to center
them around. Lee dreams of making a movie of his own to enter into
a TV contest and escape his dreary life, and Will is happy to do stunts
and star as, well, the son of Rambow while Lee takes the roll of Col. Trautman.
While their movie drops the First Blood characters into Will's wild
notebook-based tale of evil scarecrows and flying dogs, he finds it more
and more difficult to sneak away from his family to participate.
Another complication is a group of French exchange students who arrive
at their school. Didier Revol (Jules Sitruk) becomes an instant star
among the kids, and while Lee serves a week's suspension for a mishap involving
that flying dog, the Frenchman and his posse of admirers take over the
production. Will likes being part of the “in crowd” just as much
as making the movie, a production that grows more and more convoluted and
elaborate as Lee's disgust grows more and more extreme. It's a recipe
for disaster, and soon enough, that disaster arrives.
Son of Rambow has
two settings: magical and train wreck. Since I ended up liking
the movie on balance, let's start with the train wreck: pretty much
everything involving any character who's not Will or Lee. The entire
foreign exchange student subplot goes back and forth between irritating
and pointless. We've seen this “torn between the outcasts and the
cool kids” thing a million times before, and Sitruk's thin performance
can't carry the amount of screen time he gets. As Lee and Will's
movie becomes an ever-escalating Summer Blockbuster of the worst kind thanks
to his involvement, Son of Rambow flails wildly trying to say something
about the sincere vs. the insincere both on and off-screen, but it's just
that: flailing. The final scene that features Didier puts a
hypothetically interesting spin on what we've seen, but doesn't really
track when you step back and think about it.
The kids' home lives are
intended to strike a contrast between the fantasy worlds of childhood and
the movies and the hard realities of life, but since both family situations
are right out of a cable melodrama, they don't really work. Will's
mom (Jessica Stevenson, who does what she can with the role) and Lee's
brother come to life in one big scene each, but they're living in the same
movie as the shockingly overdone third act after an accident far too severe
and unmotivated for a light little comedy. And I didn't much care
for that movie.
Luckily, Son of Rambow
is as happy to flee those domestic scenes as its' characters and when it
takes refuge in the friendship and fantasy world of the two boys, it's
golden. The movie they're making is perfectly childlike, taking the
barest essentials of the First Blood characters and transferring
them to a wild tale of fantasy creatures who end up circling back around
to have some very human motivations. The “special effects” consist
mostly of the same kind of homemade costumes we all made as kids and a
hilariously outrageous series of “stunts” that basically just throw Will
through the air and hope he lands OK. Poulter is excellent, with
a range of sadness and emotion that would be the envy of most adult actors,
while Milner makes an excellent comic sidekick as the oblivious Will.
The two halves of the movie
have mostly battled to a draw as it turns the corner into its' final five
minutes. Honestly, the movie had pretty much lost me by then after
ladling on tragedy and despair I had little interest in seeing. But
then comes a wrap-up that's as good as any five minutes I've seen in any
movie this year. ****SPOILER WARNING: I'M GONNA TALK ABOUT
THE ENDING**** The finished "Son of Rambow" Will edits together works
just as well as an apology to the viewer as to Lee. It's a nifty
commentary on the power of “reshoots” to salvage a lost movie the same
way the new "Rambow" footage, hilariously relooped dialog and general reimagining
of what we've already seen salvages the boys' lost friendship. ****END
OF SPOILERS****
Fans of the Rambo
movies should be tickled: the footage we see from First Blood
is outrageously campy, but also so utterly sincere you can see why it appeals
to the kids so much. There's a great scene where we meet “Rambow”
himself, a nursing home resident shanghaied into the role who goes off-script
to talk about the horrors of the Home in a way that's pretty much indistinguishable
from any John Rambo rant about The War. And it's great to see how
everything works out for “Col. Trautman”: the late Richard Crenna
would be proud.
Son of Rambow is a
mess, but it's a squishy, often funny mess that really LOVES the movies.
Odd how little insight about life there is in a movie that at least wants
to have all the answers, but Jennings does perfectly capture that moment
as a child when you first know the movies well enough to want to climb
inside and be part of the magic yourself. And there IS magic here,
you just need to sit through entirely too much Didier Revol to get to it. |
