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Through The Magic Lantern
Copyright (c) 1993, Diamond & Shipp
All rights reserved
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WITH BRUCE DIAMOND AND RANDY SHIPP
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ THE GOOD SON: Joseph Ruben, director. Ian McEwan, │
│ screenplay. Stars Macauley Culkin, Elijah Wood, Wendy │
│ Crewson, David Morse, Daniel Hugh Kelly, Jacqueline │
│ Brooks, and Quinn Culkin. Twentieth-Century Fox. │
│ Rated R. │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
BRUCE DIAMOND: Welcome to the October installment of THROUGH THE
MAGIC LANTERN. I'm Diamond...
RANDY SHIPP: ...and I'm Shipp! This month we're bringing you a
creepy Halloween tale from the crypt, guaranteed
to send shivers down your spine and make your
blood freeze in your...what's that? Oh, OK. So
it's only the Halloween edition, but we weren't
able to find a real creepy monster movie.
Instead, we bring you a tale of evil in the guise
of a little boy. This month we review Joseph
Ruben's THE GOOD SON.
DIAMOND: Unfortunately, that does set the tone for this month's
review. Joseph Ruben has directed a couple of other
thrillers that worked, THE STEPFATHER and SLEEPING WITH
THE ENEMY, but he's kinda lost his edge here. THE GOOD
SON is numbingly predictable, and has the added
distraction of putting Macauley Culkin in a "bad seed"
role, one that just doesn't seem to work on him.
Culkin, of course, is the eponymous good son, whose
behavior is invisible to the adults around him. Only
his cousin, Mark (Elijah Wood, the better actor of the
two leads) and his sister, Connie (played by Macauley's
real sister, Quinn Culkin) see the "monster" lurking in
Henry's soul.
SHIPP: And that "monster" is too monstrous to really be
entertaining. I knew the movie bothered me the day I saw
it, but I wasn't able to put my finger on it until later.
What bothered me most about the film was the carefree
manner in which Henry goes about his dirty business, and
the filmmaker to me seemed to be trying to make me accept
it all. It's hard to articulate, and has little to do
with the technical quality of the film (which I'll get to
soon enough), but the premise of the story left me with a
bad taste in my mouth, perhaps because of the bad taste
in which it was made.
DIAMOND: You know, that's an interesting point, and I'm glad
we've gotten to it so early in the review. Critics and
regular movie-goers alike are reacting badly to this
film, and mostly due to the idea of casting a young
child in an evil role. Call me the Last American
Insensitive, but the idea of a good kid gone bad
doesn't bother me that much. There's a long history to
this motif, going all the way back to the archetypical
bad seed in the stage play and movie of the same name.
Then you've got CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED, THE LITTLE GIRL
WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE (with Jodie Foster and Martin
Sheen), THE EXORCIST, AUDREY ROSE, and the godawful
OMEN trilogy....some of the movies are good, some are
bad, but overall the theme doesn't disgust me.
SHIPP: Well, I think the part that was hardest for me to swallow
wasn't the bad kid...heck, I LIKED most of those movies.
The problem was that Ruben tried excuse Henry's behavior
with the jealous-of-baby bit. I mean, in EXORCIST, the
KID wasn't evil. I dunno...like I said, I can't put my
finger on it. If we were able to see where the whole
thing came from, I might have been more sympathetic. In
the end though, it wasn't the premise, but the execution
that I had the biggest problem with.
DIAMOND: You've pinpointed a couple of the film's deficiencies.
First, there's no earthly reason for Henry to act the
way he does, outside of needing to make this movie.
Jealousy of his baby brother just doesn't ring true,
even though Henry does tell his cousin that once you
discover you can get away with anything, you're free.
In effect, Henry has discovered his own lack of a moral
center and is reveling in it. That's way too
sophisticated an idea for a ten-year-old to grasp and
understand. And it's too bad that THE GOOD SON has no
idea how to present the idea in a sophisticated way.
SHIPP: Boy, if philosophical considerations such as these are a
problem for the ten-year-old Henry, how are we to swallow
the idea that his thirtysomething PARENTS haven't noticed
the little beast? This is the part of the review where I
would list each ridiculous situation one after the other
if I were sure I wouldn't...ahem...spoil it for someone.
Basically, though, the problem with the movie, beginning
to end, is that the audience is supposed to allow
themselves to be led on this horrible journey, and never
question anything. The slightest skepticism causes the
whole story to fall to pieces. Yeah, right...two days
into the visit, Henry has everyone thinking Mark is
psycho...
DIAMOND: Right, when Henry himself is actually the psycho.
We're given a perfunctory reason why the adults should
believe Mark is disturbed -- his mother has just passed
away, and he's staying with his aunt and uncle while
his father goes overseas on a sales trip -- but on
closer scrutiny, how the hell did Henry fool his
parents, anyway? If he's this warped and twisted,
unless they're blind and completely insensitive, his
parents would have been on to him long before Mark
joins their household. I'll even go so far as to spoil
one of those situations you mentioned. Henry talks
Mark into helping him carry a lifesize dummy to a
bridge overpass, where Henry just up and dumps the
dummy onto the highway below. He causes a multi-car
collision, but there's no follow-up to the incident.
The two boys are in PLAIN SIGHT of the highway, but
there's no mention of them or of the dummy on the TV
news later. THE GOOD SON is chock-a-block *full* of
holes like this.
SHIPP: I think the lack of witnesses (except, of course, Mark)
at the frozen lake is just about the same. By the time
we've been through four or five of these beat-you-over-
the-head expositions, we've more than gotten the point.
The scenes in which Henry oh-so-cleverly traps Mark are
just about as subtle and well executed. The entire film
lacks subtlety. Maybe that's why, even when Ruben
figures out the pacing and the adrenaline thing by the
end, I still thought it was flat and boring. We spend
five minutes with a cliffhanger (pardon the pun) ending,
the outcome of which was a foregone conclusion from
fifteen minutes into the picture.
DIAMOND: Here's one of the points where we differ, but not by
much. I knew the ending was a foregone conclusion, but
as you noted, Ruben has deduced the pacing and tension
by this time (a little late, I'd say), and I found the
ending pretty darn gripping ... if you'll pardon the
pun.
SHIPP: I don't know...I think Ruben may have had one last chance
to redeem the picture at the end, to give some meaning to
it all, but he let it slip from his fingers (if YOU'LL
pardon the pun), and we ended up with more of the same
crap we'd seen for the last hour or so.
DIAMOND: Well, admittedly, Ruben didn't exactly bring us to the
very edge of excitement (if *you'll* pardon the pun),
but if he had directed the picture from the very
beginning with this same kind of energy, he might never
have had to provide a meaning to it at all. Evil for
evil's sake, as Mark tries to explain to a therapist
halfway through the film.
SHIPP: A therapist who needs her license pulled for not
recognizing the wretch for what he is...whatta movie full
of dense people...
DIAMOND: I really don't have much to add. Elijah Wood is good
as Mark, but he was more endearing in THE ADVENTURES OF
HUCK FINN earlier this year. Quinn Culkin looks like
her brother, and may turn out to be a more genuine
actor; we'll just have to see. The adults are more or
less cyphers, aside from Wendy Crewson as Henry's mom,
who spends most of the film pining away for her dead
baby boy, drowned in three inches of bath water a few
years before.
SHIPP: I'm with you...Elijah Wood is OK, even if he is written
into more unbelievable fixes in one movie than any other
kid actor in history. And Quinn is cute. I'm no closer
to liking Macauley, but I may at least raise an eyebrow
if I see Quinn Culkin in the credits of a movie. As you
say, we'll have to see. All in all, I think I'd wait for
video if I had it to do again, and even then, I think I'd
spend my bucks on a *good* evil kid movie. Heck, it's
Halloween...about time for another look at THE EXORCIST.
Leave THE GOOD SON and its rating of 3 out of 10 on the
shelf.
DIAMOND: Wow, I thought you hated THE GOOD SON more than I did.
I can't see rating it more than 2 out of 10. Maybe
we'll have better luck with next month's movie, as we
continue the long march towards the holiday season.
Till next time, I'm Laurel...
SHIPP: ...and I'm the Cisco Kid! Please place your popcorn and
soda containers in the proper receptacle! See you next
month for the November edition of THROUGH THE MAGIC
LANTERN.