About a Boy: ‘Boy A’

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The New York Sun

On the surface, the director John Crowley’s new film “Boy A,” which opens Friday at Film Forum, is somewhat typical of what might be called the Ken Loach school of socially aware contemporary English melodrama. Like Mr. Loach’s films “My Name Is Joe” and “Sweet Sixteen,” “Boy A” depicts a social outcast’s climb back up from rock bottom and attempt to create a stable life as a contributing member of a community that has shunned him.

But in “Boy A,” Jack Burridge (Andrew Garfield) has fallen farther and at a much younger age than either the reformed Scottish alcoholic of “My Name Is Joe” or the teenage petty crook in “Sweet Sixteen.” While attending elementary school under his born name Eric Wilson, Jack conspired in a violent crime so heinous that he was anonymously tried in both court and the tabloids as “Boy A” and locked up in a reformatory for 14 years.

Mr. Crowley carefully sets up “Boy A” with an acute ear and eye for the emotional and experiential realities of Jack’s emancipation. “It’s like I’m having a dream,” Jack tells his caseworker/guardian angel Terry (Ken Loach veteran Peter Mullan), before taking his first ride in a car as a free man. Nose nearly pressed against the glass, Jack feasts on the passing roadside sights with the hungry wonder of both an ex-con leaving a supervised institutional existence and a boy grown into young adulthood and suddenly aware of the possibilities that maturation offers.

The script of “Boy A,” adapted by Mark O’Rowe from Jonathan Trigell’s novel, rather emphatically insists that if Jack’s real name and gruesome past were publicly disclosed, the young man would be the target of vigilante extremists and ostracized by everyone else. So emphatically so that the sound of that particular ticking plot clock grows nearly deafening by midway through the film.

Though the British citizenry is apparently unforgiving, the crown considers Jack rehabilitated and has seen fit to give him his new name and a job and lodgings in Manchester. At work, Jack earns the friendship of a pair of footloose lads who inadvertently teach him a few of the basic principles of recreation, provincial British 20-something-style. Jack also meets and, after an awkward initial courtship, falls for a female co-worker named Michelle (Katie Lyons).

For the most part “Boy A” is a film of uncompromisingly tender depictions of human affection and attachment. Despite the pints, fights, tabs of E, and all the other rote trappings of workaday British youth culture on display, Jack and his co-worker Eric form a marvelously honest friendship that is the most vivid and realistic depiction of male bonding since the considerably more facetious “Superbad.” Jack and Michelle’s romance, Terry’s dealings with his own estranged son, and flashbacks showing young “Boy A” Eric Wilson’s passive, co-dependent relationship with his co-murderer Philip are similarly well-wrought examples of character-driven storytelling at its most engaging.

The performances in “Boy A” are uniformly nuanced, from Taylor Doherty as an abused and consequently abusive pre-teenager, unafraid to head-butt a kid twice his size, to Mr. Garfield’s unrelentingly tactile embodiment of a boy who came of age behind bars trying to impersonate a man out on his own.

That the film ultimately errs on the side of melodrama (with a side order, as is often the case with latter-day British kitchen-sink storytelling, of magic realism) is forgivable, though frustrating. Major plot developments and the inevitable moment of truth arrive more or less on cue via cell phones, and procedural mechanics spelled out early in the film go ignored in order to push Jack as far out on a limb as possible.

But Mr. Garfield’s and the ensemble’s dedicated acts of creation, and Mr. Crowley and the cinematographer Rob Hardy’s nearly colorless visualization of northern England are so exceptionally evocative that one roots for Jack in his battle against both a society and a script that are bound and determined not to give the poor kid a break.


The New York Sun

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