Showing @ Cameo 1, 19 June 20:00 & 25 June 15:30
Gaby Dellal /Canada /2011 / 93 mins
Nothing exposes a society’s values quicker than the death of a child, such as the extended hysteria surrounding the abduction of the white, middle-class Madeline McCaan, loudly condemned by people apparently not so offended by the endless suffering of children in the developing world or their own city’s tenements. In Gaby Dellal’s film of Leslie Schwart’s novel, it’s similarly a slain sprog that brings underlying tensions and unresolved issues to the fore.
In an unnamed snowy American town, young father Ethan (Thomas Dekker) leaves his kid Nate asleep in his car for some time during a blizzard. The next time Ethan sees him Nate is notably deader, and the State, headed by the local district attorney (Jeremy Piven), who may have anterior motivations, wants to charge Ethan with criminal negligence.
Perhaps a little too strident in its boiling down of the novel’s action, Catherine Trieschmann’s script shortchanges the arc of several characters, not least Piven’s embittered lawyer; we see the main emotional stops but miss most of the journey. Then again, this may be the necessary price to pay for managing to create a sense of how a whole community is altered by the rippling complications of one boy’s death; in some way, everyone in the town is connected to it. Nate’s young mother Cindy (Lynn Collins) sees how her own alcoholism helped doom her son, while her mother blames herself for not helping, and local waitress Angie (Mira Sorvino) blames herself for not calling Ethan on various irresponsible actions in the past. Bolstered by an ensemble of strong performances, this highly humane film wants to remind us that no matter how divided we’ve become as individuals, we’re all part of a bigger community.