Review: Boy A

RECOMMENDED
“Boy A” is an overly tidy but keeningly bleak tragedy about modern society’s disbelief in the possibility of redemption. Tried as a child as a participant in a terrible crime, John Crowley’s “Boy A” is now 24, re-christened Jack (Andrew Garfield) after fourteen years in stir. Garfield’s gangly but still as avid and quick to hurt and love as a child. He’s all shy innocence amid a welter of crushing feelings of guilt. (He looks like the actor Jeremy Davies crossed with Paul Thomas Anderson and twice as fidgety.) Jack’s caseworker, Terry (Peter Mullan, bearing the weight of his usual stolid Scots manliness) is masculinity, confidence, rugged handsomeness. (This too, shall crack.) Beautifully shot by Rob Hardy and edited by Lucia Zuchetti ( editor of “The Queen,” as well as most of Lynn Ramsay’s features and shorts), it’s a measured eyeful against the scattered argy-bargy of Crowley’s earlier “Intermission” (2003). When Jack is first released, his face looks out and up at the world from the passenger side of a moving car: reflected against it, the elongated midriff of Kate Moss in an advert, astride a bearskin rug. Crowley makes extensive use of longer lenses and shallow focus. Decors confine: as Jack cowers beneath a duvet, its grid pattern holds him fast to ground. You could even make a case for how Jack and Terry’s jacket collars rhyme: this is a picture designed within a breath of its life. However gorgeous it is, Crowley’s cool pictorialism works somehow against Jack’s anxious, rabbity manner. (The few “Starman”-type “what’s that” moments pass quietly.) You can’t fault a director who nods in a mirror-walled disco spaz-out toward the jaw-dropping ending (down to the character’s two-tone shoes) of Claire Denis’ “Beau Travail,” another study of masculinity put to pasture. Jack’s attic garret serves the plot in late turns, but the simplified interiors of all the characters’ abodes are less Bresson than Alan Cavalier (“Therese”): we live in shafts of light, why do we keep walking around them? The story accelerates as we know more of the past and move toward an uncertain, yet surely unpleasant future. Who would tell the world this man does not deserve a second chance? Someone equally as quick to hurt and love, you might venture. The sound design is stellar, too, with one burst of the squeal of train to track, from wheel to steel rail, stinging, simple counterpoint to the moment. A woman’s gift of an empty wallet, ready to be filled with fortune, future and identity is so on the nose that you take a breath and then admire only the carpentry of the script rather than the hard emotions that ought to well up. Still, the many moments where the sensation of the earth collapsing beneath your feet are physicalized by Crowley and Hardy are impressive. However schematic “Boy A” may be made at times, its lack of sanguinity about the modern world is cold, discomforting and ultimately affecting. 100m. (Ray Pride)