HALLAM FOE is a good name for a story about being the enemy of your own peace. I wish the movie were as good.
In the pantheon of coming of age fairy tales, there is no more common theme than the Oedipal; it's easy, and easy to screw up. David Mackenzie doesn't completely screw this one up until the end, but he does take a lot of convenient outs along the way, some handed him by Peter Jinks and others invented with Ed Whitmore.
Start with a boy whose dead mother obsession turns his anger on, yes, a wicked stepmother, whom he sleeps with at the first opportunity, which is I suppose one way to revenge himself. But the deed only sends him careening off to find a better mother figure, this time a dead ringer - which brings us to another really easy choice: Mom's doppelganger is an HR chief who immediately and not very credibly hires him so that he can have less trouble stalking her. When she finds out that he spends most of his time glued to her windows with binoculars, she's more willing than most victimized girls to give him second and third chances to explain himself.
So Oedipus gets to sleep with two surrogate mothers, but in attacking his surrogate and real fathers, he inflicts only minor wounds that are not very satisfying to him nor to me. The whole movie is like that. There are many missed opportunities (like a real consequence for anybody's actions), red herrings (like a maybe suspicious/maybe not pair of third act crutches) and dead ends (whatever happened to his voyeurism? and where did it come from, for that matter?).
Oh well. As David Mackenzie movies go, at least it's no YOUNG ADAM. It is enormously less repellent and makes slightly more sense than that, and there are compensations: Claire Forlani, looking more severe than usual, and Sophia Myles, bringing some reality to a ridiculous role, and Ciaran Hinds and Ewen Bremner and Maurice Roeves, who are never less than perfect. Plus a resourceful and occasionally charming Oedipus, well played by the increasingly interesting Jaime Bell. And within its limitations the movie is intermittently, almost consistently engaging and enjoyable... until it winds up down by the loch, in a graceless calm-after-the-sturm und drang revelation that patly solves everyone's problems except mine.
In the pantheon of coming of age fairy tales, there is no more common theme than the Oedipal; it's easy, and easy to screw up. David Mackenzie doesn't completely screw this one up until the end, but he does take a lot of convenient outs along the way, some handed him by Peter Jinks and others invented with Ed Whitmore.
Start with a boy whose dead mother obsession turns his anger on, yes, a wicked stepmother, whom he sleeps with at the first opportunity, which is I suppose one way to revenge himself. But the deed only sends him careening off to find a better mother figure, this time a dead ringer - which brings us to another really easy choice: Mom's doppelganger is an HR chief who immediately and not very credibly hires him so that he can have less trouble stalking her. When she finds out that he spends most of his time glued to her windows with binoculars, she's more willing than most victimized girls to give him second and third chances to explain himself.
So Oedipus gets to sleep with two surrogate mothers, but in attacking his surrogate and real fathers, he inflicts only minor wounds that are not very satisfying to him nor to me. The whole movie is like that. There are many missed opportunities (like a real consequence for anybody's actions), red herrings (like a maybe suspicious/maybe not pair of third act crutches) and dead ends (whatever happened to his voyeurism? and where did it come from, for that matter?).
Oh well. As David Mackenzie movies go, at least it's no YOUNG ADAM. It is enormously less repellent and makes slightly more sense than that, and there are compensations: Claire Forlani, looking more severe than usual, and Sophia Myles, bringing some reality to a ridiculous role, and Ciaran Hinds and Ewen Bremner and Maurice Roeves, who are never less than perfect. Plus a resourceful and occasionally charming Oedipus, well played by the increasingly interesting Jaime Bell. And within its limitations the movie is intermittently, almost consistently engaging and enjoyable... until it winds up down by the loch, in a graceless calm-after-the-sturm und drang revelation that patly solves everyone's problems except mine.