BEFORE: Now that I've posted my reviews for "Ready Player One" and "Isle of Dogs", I'm all caught up - there are no more outstanding reviews for films that I saw on the big screen that need to be worked in. But I'm thinking of seeing three more films in the theater this year - "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom", "The Incredibles 2" and "Ant-Man and the Wasp". I think I have a way to work them all in, that last one in fact could provide a neat little outro to get back to narrative stuff after my Summer Rock Concert documentary series. Plus I think I've got a slot for "Jurassic World" a few days after July 4 (which means I should try to see it on July 2, if possible). And I've got more Samuel L. Jackson films planned for September, so working in "The Incredibles 2" should be no problem. I'm guessing any film released in November, like "Venom", could be out of luck - but hey, a movie geek's got to have his priorities.
Naomi Watts carries over from "Chuck", and this is perhaps the most recent film I added to my list JUST to fill up a DVD. Those days are behind me, now that I can't dub films from cable to DVD any more, so going forward I'll have to rely on just Netflix, iTunes, On Demand and Academy screeners.
THE PLOT: With instructions from her genius sons' carefully crafted notebook, a single mother sets out to rescue a young girl from the hands of her abusive stepfather.
AFTER: This is a film about several things, one of them being a really smart kid who essentially is the adult in his family - his single mother plays first-person shooter video-games, drinks too much and has trouble being a disciplinarian. If not for her waitressing job and ability to drive a car, she'd seem more like a child in this family. Henry, meanwhile, runs the family's financial plans, invests in the stock market, and has a clear moral sense about what's right and what's wrong - so he's not really your typical 11-year-old.
Which is all well and good, until he gets sick and this family unit starts to fall apart. What will happen to his mother and younger brother if he's no longer there to help them? More importantly, who will look after the girl next door, since Henry seems to be the only one trying to point out that she's clearly the victim of some form of abuse? To the film's benefit, we never see for sure what form this abuse takes, because then it would have to be depicted on camera, and that wouldn't be appropriate. Our imaginations can fill in the gap here.
But this film, through the accidental avoidance of clarity on this point, has stumbled into something resembling the moral dilemma that we all sometimes face - at what point do we stick our necks out to help another person? Or perhaps it's not accidental, because early in the film Henry is in a grocery store with his mother and brother, and they witness a woman in the aisles, being menaced or threatened by her own boyfriend. The mother's argument is that the situation is none of their business, but Henry, the smart one, feels strongly that this is their business, this is in fact everyone's business, to speak out against oppression or violence or abuse whenever we see it. These are the thoughts of a child, but again, a very smart child. However, the mother has some wisdom when she points out that there are many ways that inserting themselves into this situation could make things much worse. The boyfriend might back down temporarily, but then enact an even greater punishment on the woman later, in private. Or he could become even more violent on the spot, and cause harm to the people who were only trying to help.
This is, of course, foreshadowing for the situation the neighbor girl is in later in the film. Henry knows she's being abused, he's reported this to his school principal, but since the girl's stepfather is an upstanding member of the community AND the town's police commissioner, AND his brother is the county investigator for reports of child abuse, it seems that there's nothing that can be done. There's a bit of a logical trap here, because to assume that there's only one way to defuse this situation is to basically give up ahead of time, but let's put that on hold for a minute. Henry makes anonymous calls to Child Protection Agencies, but notices no change in the situation - meanwhile, the girl is becoming more withdrawn and her grades begin lagging.
We live in confusing times, our country is divided and yet at the same time, opinions about how to "fix" everything are all over social media. People speaking from behind the cover of anonymity are free to weigh in on every popular issue, and this results in people being tried and convicted of being "wrong" in other's eyes, and this seems to be the worst mistake that one can make. And often the punishments are more severe than the crime. Remember the dentist who shot that lion in Africa? He ended up losing his entire dental practice after being shamed on social media. Remember that white woman who claimed black heritage? She may never work again. And now the second wave of the #metoo movement seems to be going after male celebrities who are guilty of being bad boyfriends in the past, which up until recently had been a forgivable crime, or at least one that didn't precipitate their ability to have an acting career. Now, by no means am I saying that any of these people's original actions were correct in any way, but there are no written rules that say that their actions should cause them to be ostracized from society or that they should be tarred, feathered and run out of town. The majority of these cases in the past year have been tried only in the court of public opinion, something that would have been impossible a decade ago.
Take the case of that Colorado baker, which went all the way to the Supreme Court - if you missed it, a baker refused to make a cake for a gay wedding, because of his religious beliefs and conservative stance against homosexuality. He felt that by making the cake, he'd be demonstrating tacit approval of the couple's lifestyle, which he did not want to give. And the couple felt that it wasn't a baker's place to make a moral judgment on his clients' lifestyles, and that he should be forced to make the cake and keep his opinions about gay marriage to himself. This is a complex legal conundrum, because the gay couple has the right to get married and have a cake, but the baker also has religious freedom, and these beliefs are in conflict with each other. Now, of course, there's a simple solution, the baker could just say, "I'm much too busy, please go to another bakery" and the couple can then just hire a more open-minded baker, but then we haven't resolved which rights are more important here. The only way to enjoy freedom of speech (and thought) is to go on and let someone who's homophobic continue to be that way, even though it may be difficult and painful, because in the end, you can't mandate someone's private opinion, which includes their right to be "wrong", according to your personal standards.
However, that's not what happened, which was probably a bunch of hate speech from both directions, liberal and conservative - because we now live in a culture where everyone can speak their mind freely, especially online, and things get personal in about 10 seconds once anyone realizes there are other people who enjoy a different point of view on things. And before long, we're back to "There he is! GET HIM!" when we see someone that doesn't agree with us. When did "Love thy neighbor" turn into "Love thy neighbor, but only if he shares the same moral and political views as you do." It's easy to love the people who agree with you, but harder to love the people who disagree, and yet everyone so easily makes the distinction between them. Now, maybe it's impossible to love bigots, homophobes and Neo-Nazis, but there's the challenge - if you hate them, aren't you in essence becoming a little bit like them?
Now we've got the latest conundrum, people who work in the Trump administration, which is responsible for dealing with illegal immigrants with a new "no tolerance" policy that separated children from their parents, are suddenly finding that they can't go out in public without some form of upheaval. Restaurants have recently refused service to both Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders and also Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, and this is really just the gay wedding cake conundrum in another form. Does a restaurant have the right to refuse service to someone in the Trump administration, just because the owner or staff disagrees with their policies? Does someone who works all day to trample the human rights of others have any right to complain when their right to a peaceful meal gets taken away? Why would they want to eat at a restaurant that doesn't want to serve them, anyway? Do regular people have the right to then support this restaurant more, or give it bad reviews on Yelp, because the staff took a stand? And where does this all end? (Hopefully not with a riot at the restaurant, or the closing of said restaurant, but these days anything is possible.)
My point here is that there were several ways to deal with an "unfavorable" person eating at a restaurant, and public shaming probably wasn't the best way - but since tensions are running high, nobody's really looking for reasonable solutions right now, everybody wants to make a fuss and talk louder than the opposition, in order to get their point across, and perhaps more importantly, get everyone else to agree that the opposition is "wrong". That's so not going to happen, because now it seems like 50% of people will take up the opposing argument on any debate. (Damn it, it's the white dress/blue dress thing all over again... or "Laurel/Yanny", whichever.) Why couldn't the restaurant manager have spoken to the Secretary in private, mentioned calmly that for fear of causing a scene, their service was being politely declined? Nope, there's nothing between zero and 60 mph any more, so let's get right on to breaking stuff. Again, I don't know where we should draw the line any more, since more often than not the prevailing argument seems to be "This person said or did something I didn't like, so therefore in the future they have no right to hold down a job of any kind and should be publicly humiliated for good measure."
But let me bring this back to "The Book of Henry". Since nobody seems to be able to help the girl next door, Henry leaves his mother explicit instructions on how to handle this situation, in the form of tape-recorded messages that will allow her to follow a step-by-step plan, purchase a weapon without a waiting period, take down the evil stepfather, and leave no clear evidence of this crime. There's simply no in-between here, no middle ground between "leave well enough alone" and "here's how to go from single mother to experienced assassin". And even Henry, even in the condition that he was in, should have realized that there's a HUGE gap here, and there should have been many things of more reasonable bent attempted to fix this situation. There are a dozen ways that his mother could have slipped up in this endeavor, and then been on the hook for forgery, illegal gun purchasing, fraud, intention to commit murder, and many other charges which would have put her, and her custody of his brother, in jeopardy.
So what's really going on here? Was Henry smart, but not wise in the ways of the world? Did he just mean well, without taking all of the possible consequences of certain actions into account? Should the plans he generated while he was sick have been given this much weight, or should they have been ignored outright? Did he miss some really simple solutions to the problem (like, I don't know, the girl could have been given money to run away from home, that would have been one option. Or, if Henry witnessed the abuse from his bedroom window, why not capture it on video?) or was he guilty of being so sure of his moral beliefs that his plan went from zero to sixty, so to speak?
It's a complicated situation, and there are no clear answers perhaps. Please note that the situation did resolve itself, but in a different way - which almost felt like a narrative cheat. Henry did manage to bring about some good and improve his neighbor's situation, but it just didn't play out in the way that he intended - therefore I can't tell if he should be congratulated or not. My point, ultimately, is that nobody has the right to act as judge, jury and executioner for another person, based on just the suspicion of wrong-doing, meanwhile subverting their rights and due process. And this should be the case both on the internet and in the real world.
NITPICK POINT: I know that some girls mature faster than boys, but this girl just did not look like she belonged in elementary school, she looked much too old to be a sixth-grader. Was she held back a grade three times? Henry looked 11, sure, but you could see in the talent show scene she was definitely older. (IMDB says she was born in 2002, so probably 14 at the time of filming.)
NITPICK POINT #2: The film shows that Henry has created all of these "Rube Goldberg"-type devices, with the intention of showing how smart he is, that he has skills for inventing things. But if you're familiar with the work of cartoonist Rube Goldberg, you know that his inventions weren't designed to work in the real world, but instead to be funny cartoons, and often they would depict a very simple action (like lighting a cigarette) being performed by the most complex, ridiculous devices possible. In other words, a smart person wouldn't create a device to do something in 40 complicated steps when it could be performed more simply and efficiently in another way. So this was a bad use of these devices, if Henry liked them that would mean he had a flair for the ridiculous, and that's out of character for him.
Also starring Jaeden Lieberher (last seen in "Midnight Special"), Jacob Tremblay (last seen in "Room"), Sarah Silverman (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Dean Norris (last seen in "Gattaca"), Lee Pace (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Maddie Ziegler, Tonya Pinkins, Bobby Moynihan (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets"), Geraldine Hughes, Jackson Nicoll (last seen in "Bad Grandpa"), Joel Marsh Garland, Wass Stevens (also carrying over from "Chuck").
RATING: 4 out of 10 children's books
No comments:
Post a Comment