Maybe I'm getting old and jaded but I'm losing my patience with movies that have no point. Not ones that don't have a plot. Ones where there's no reason why this particular story is being told. I don't need a great or transcendent purpose. Just "make you laugh" or "scare you" or "look at this actor really shine in this role". That's all I need. For the life of me, though, I couldn't tell you why Little Boy Blue exists. The plot is a meandering mess. None of the dialog is at all memorable. The cast never gets a chance to do more than drive-by emoting. The direction is competent, yet unexceptional. The theme or message of the film is
hell if I know.
Little Boy Blue rotates around the West family living in an expanded trailer in the Texas wasteland. Ray West (John Savage)is a Vietnam veteran with some kind of penile injury that's left him impotent and sporting a colostomy bag. Ray is a domineering father to Jimmy (Ryan Phillippe), his 19 or 20 year old son who lives in a shed a few dozen yards from the trailer and dotes on his two much younger brothers. Between the two of them is wife and mother Kate (Nastassia Kinski), who spends most of her time trying to manage Ray's explosive anger. Oh, and Ray also forces Jimmy and Kate to have sex while he watches. To the extent there's any sort of coherent narrative here, it's about Jimmy finally edging into manhood but pulling away from his girlfriend Traci (Jenny Lewis) because of his self-loathing and desire to get Kate and his brothers away from Ray, with all that bookended by a family mystery even deeper and darker than incest.
It's not like anyone is doing bad work here, there's simply no point to any of it. Maybe it could have been a drama about the legacy of incest. Maybe it could have been a thriller about how a long ago crime still festers in a family's present. Maybe it could have been flat out creepy and provocative by graphically depicting the sexual relationship between a very attractive mother and her even prettier son. These filmmakers don't commit to any of that or offer any alternative rationales for this motion picture. They just screw around for a while and then pull an ending completely out of left field that doesn't seem to have any thematic connection to what came before.
If this sort of "storytelling without a cause" doesn't irk you, Little Boy Blue might be somewhat entertaining. John Savage is always interesting to watch and young Phillippe shows flashes of being more than a pretty boy actor. Director Antonio Tibaldi never takes command but keeps all his plates in the air until the arbitrary conclusion. I could never get past the question "Why am I watching this again?"
View this at your own risk.
Little Boy Blue rotates around the West family living in an expanded trailer in the Texas wasteland. Ray West (John Savage)is a Vietnam veteran with some kind of penile injury that's left him impotent and sporting a colostomy bag. Ray is a domineering father to Jimmy (Ryan Phillippe), his 19 or 20 year old son who lives in a shed a few dozen yards from the trailer and dotes on his two much younger brothers. Between the two of them is wife and mother Kate (Nastassia Kinski), who spends most of her time trying to manage Ray's explosive anger. Oh, and Ray also forces Jimmy and Kate to have sex while he watches. To the extent there's any sort of coherent narrative here, it's about Jimmy finally edging into manhood but pulling away from his girlfriend Traci (Jenny Lewis) because of his self-loathing and desire to get Kate and his brothers away from Ray, with all that bookended by a family mystery even deeper and darker than incest.
It's not like anyone is doing bad work here, there's simply no point to any of it. Maybe it could have been a drama about the legacy of incest. Maybe it could have been a thriller about how a long ago crime still festers in a family's present. Maybe it could have been flat out creepy and provocative by graphically depicting the sexual relationship between a very attractive mother and her even prettier son. These filmmakers don't commit to any of that or offer any alternative rationales for this motion picture. They just screw around for a while and then pull an ending completely out of left field that doesn't seem to have any thematic connection to what came before.
If this sort of "storytelling without a cause" doesn't irk you, Little Boy Blue might be somewhat entertaining. John Savage is always interesting to watch and young Phillippe shows flashes of being more than a pretty boy actor. Director Antonio Tibaldi never takes command but keeps all his plates in the air until the arbitrary conclusion. I could never get past the question "Why am I watching this again?"
View this at your own risk.