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Mysterious Skin
Doesn't come to much
2004
Director: Greg Araki
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg
Totally unnecessary.
THE SETUP:
Two kids who were sexually abused by their baseball coach journey through life and eventually find each other.
DISCUSSION:
There's a lot of good stuff about this movie, yet ultimately it all comes to so little that it's hard to really get behind it. The story concerns two kids who were sexually abused by their coach. One of them remembers it, and remembers liking it, and continues searching for father figures as he hustles first in their small town and then in New York. The other doesn’t remember it, and for a long time projects all of it onto this fantasy that he was abducted by space aliens.
In the good column is the frank and unsentimental look at sex and sexual abuse the film takes. I liked that the kid acknowledged an attraction to the baseball coach when he first saw him, saying he looked like the guys in his mom’s Playgirl magazines. I could totally relate to that. And the movie acknowledged that some kids who are abused enjoy it—not that it isn’t bad or traumatic, but they’re kids, and don’t know what they’re doing.
Also in the good column is that the film credits the audience with some intelligence. Not all of the dots are explicitly connected, and I like how the director credits the audience with enough thought to connect them and remain attentive throughout.
I also like the matter-of-fact way the movie presents the gay characters and their lives. It’s free of the tendentiousness and speechifying that plagues a great deal of “gay” movies.
I also thought Elizabeth Shue was good. She was just very vivid and real. All of the performances were pretty good. And there’s our little Dawny, all grown up and smoking pot!
The problem is that it can’t really overcome the “so what?” factor. Maybe if I knew before I went in that this was essentially a character piece, sort of a slice-of-life thing, I would feel differently. It also starts to slow significantly during its second hour. When you’re looking at your watch saying “Uh, but, shouldn’t something be happening by now?” The movie ends with one of those “moment of grace” kind of things, which unfortunately erases a fair amount of the goodwill you may have built up for it, replacing it with a growl of “that’s IT?”
This was adapted from a novel, that I strongly suspect was autobiographical. It has that sense that autobiographical fiction often has that the simple fact that these things HAPPENED is reason enough to record it, and reason enough for others to read/see it. One doesn’t want to come down too hard on this movie for the obvious strengths it does have, the subject matter it covers and the way it treats it. But I don’t think that’s quite enough.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
It is definitely not a waste of time, but if I had it all to do over again, I think I'd skip it.
