I found watching this frustrating since I felt that there is material enough in Knowles' book to make a great movie, but this effort falls decidedly short.
On the surface the story is simple: two boys meet as roommates at a prestigious northeastern prep school and become close friends, then a life-changing singular event occurs and its effects are described.
The two boys are Gene and Phineous (affectionatly known as "Finny"). Gene is reserved and studious whereas Finny is an outgoing athlete who likes to buck the rules--he is the most popular guy on campus. Relationships between such personality types are not uncommon and can be quite intense. That is one of the problems I had with this movie--I felt it failed to establish the intensity of the friendship, and that is crucial to the whole enterprise. Prior to the pivotal event in the tree, Finny is portrayed as an eternally smiling extrovert, so much so that his shallow non-stop good humor and cavorting around started to grate on me.
Gene and Finny never had a substantial conversation about anything, so it was hard for me to see what either saw in the other, outside of opposites attracting. Given that, latent homosexuality would make sense to me, but the chemistry of strong attachments is always a bit of a mystery, so answering the question about the sexual content of the relationship is not essential.
The question of what happened in the tree is central and the movie leaves little doubt that the act was willful, rather than impulsive, on Gene's part. In the book, there remains an ambiguity and that is at the heart of the novel. The reason for Gene's act remains open to question, even in the movie. Did it rise out of jealousy? Or was it to quell the constant fear of repeatedly having to jump out of the tree in order to please Finny? Or was it from resentment that he was becoming too subservient to Finny? Or maybe he was afraid of developing too strong an attachment to Finny? Or maybe it was the reason that Gene postulates toward the end of the book, "It was just some ignorance inside me, some crazy thing inside me, something blind, that's all it was." I want to think that it was some evil atavistic impulse that lies deep in the DNA of man--a small act that paralleled the evil of WWII that served as the backdrop to the story.
The opening scene that has fellow students pulling Gene and Phineous out of their sleep to be marched to an auditorium when they would be the subjects of an inquiry into what happened in the tree is a mistake. I assume that the idea was to provide a hook to interest you in how the situation evolved to that scene, but it takes away any surprise that scene has at the end--a scene that we then have to watch again in its entirety.
Neither J Barton (as Gene) nor Toby Moore (as Finny) seems to be a natural actor. Most of their scenes were stilted and awkward. And Moore is too old to be playing a seventeen-year-old.
An oddity that struck me as unreal was that there was no mention of sex or women. You coop up a bunch of male teenagers in close quarters and there just has to be discussions about sex, encounters of a sexual nature, or some form of sexual expression (either internal or external).
There are many scenes that do not work. One such is a conversation between Gene and Finny just before they head out to the tree where Finny expresses surprise that Gene needs to study to do well. These guys had been roommates for several weeks by this time, so it should have been pretty obvious that Gene was studious. Would it not be clear to anyone that study is required to perform well at a prestigious school? Finny's comment was, "I thought it just came natural to you." There was a scene where a couple of guys came into Gene and Finny's room with one of them pretending to be Hitler (complete with fake mustache, a brown shirt, and Nazi armband) and then the four guys proceeded to strut around and do a dance that was embarrassing to watch. Another scene involves a student known as "Leper" (totally overplayed as a geek) who has gone to war and returned as a basket case and has come back to the campus, but not as a student. He subsists by stealing food and living in a thatched hut in the forest near the campus. How ridiculous is that?
This film is an unfortunate misfire.
On the surface the story is simple: two boys meet as roommates at a prestigious northeastern prep school and become close friends, then a life-changing singular event occurs and its effects are described.
The two boys are Gene and Phineous (affectionatly known as "Finny"). Gene is reserved and studious whereas Finny is an outgoing athlete who likes to buck the rules--he is the most popular guy on campus. Relationships between such personality types are not uncommon and can be quite intense. That is one of the problems I had with this movie--I felt it failed to establish the intensity of the friendship, and that is crucial to the whole enterprise. Prior to the pivotal event in the tree, Finny is portrayed as an eternally smiling extrovert, so much so that his shallow non-stop good humor and cavorting around started to grate on me.
Gene and Finny never had a substantial conversation about anything, so it was hard for me to see what either saw in the other, outside of opposites attracting. Given that, latent homosexuality would make sense to me, but the chemistry of strong attachments is always a bit of a mystery, so answering the question about the sexual content of the relationship is not essential.
The question of what happened in the tree is central and the movie leaves little doubt that the act was willful, rather than impulsive, on Gene's part. In the book, there remains an ambiguity and that is at the heart of the novel. The reason for Gene's act remains open to question, even in the movie. Did it rise out of jealousy? Or was it to quell the constant fear of repeatedly having to jump out of the tree in order to please Finny? Or was it from resentment that he was becoming too subservient to Finny? Or maybe he was afraid of developing too strong an attachment to Finny? Or maybe it was the reason that Gene postulates toward the end of the book, "It was just some ignorance inside me, some crazy thing inside me, something blind, that's all it was." I want to think that it was some evil atavistic impulse that lies deep in the DNA of man--a small act that paralleled the evil of WWII that served as the backdrop to the story.
The opening scene that has fellow students pulling Gene and Phineous out of their sleep to be marched to an auditorium when they would be the subjects of an inquiry into what happened in the tree is a mistake. I assume that the idea was to provide a hook to interest you in how the situation evolved to that scene, but it takes away any surprise that scene has at the end--a scene that we then have to watch again in its entirety.
Neither J Barton (as Gene) nor Toby Moore (as Finny) seems to be a natural actor. Most of their scenes were stilted and awkward. And Moore is too old to be playing a seventeen-year-old.
An oddity that struck me as unreal was that there was no mention of sex or women. You coop up a bunch of male teenagers in close quarters and there just has to be discussions about sex, encounters of a sexual nature, or some form of sexual expression (either internal or external).
There are many scenes that do not work. One such is a conversation between Gene and Finny just before they head out to the tree where Finny expresses surprise that Gene needs to study to do well. These guys had been roommates for several weeks by this time, so it should have been pretty obvious that Gene was studious. Would it not be clear to anyone that study is required to perform well at a prestigious school? Finny's comment was, "I thought it just came natural to you." There was a scene where a couple of guys came into Gene and Finny's room with one of them pretending to be Hitler (complete with fake mustache, a brown shirt, and Nazi armband) and then the four guys proceeded to strut around and do a dance that was embarrassing to watch. Another scene involves a student known as "Leper" (totally overplayed as a geek) who has gone to war and returned as a basket case and has come back to the campus, but not as a student. He subsists by stealing food and living in a thatched hut in the forest near the campus. How ridiculous is that?
This film is an unfortunate misfire.