Brand-New Boy

The world around Jack is normal — but his place in it is anything but.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

Jack Burridge (Andrew Garfield) is a shy young man, sweet and almost comically timid, with the bearing of a startled faun. He is also a cold-blooded murderer, although almost no one knows it. As a 10-year-old, he and another boy savagely murdered another child, but now Jack — or Eric, as he was known then — has served his time and been given a second chance, with a new identity and a state-appointed counselor named Terry (Peter Mullan) to help him back into the world.

Although he is now a man, Jack still acts like a child, and at times looks like one, as well, nervously sucking on his lower lip as he eases into his new life. Posing as Terry's nephew, he lands a blue-collar job and starts forming tentative relationships with his co-workers, even striking up a romance with the pretty girl in payroll (Katie Lyons). But the world is a dangerous, uncontrolled place. When his new friends take him dancing, he splits off from the group and finds himself a secluded corner, his arms lashing the air as if tussling with an unseen foe.

Garfield, whose grating performance in Lions for Lambs went mercifully unseen, is actually more charismatic as a rehabilitated killer than he was as a spoiled undergrad. In fact, he's almost too likable: The questions the movie means to pose about the tension between rehabilitation and retribution are too easily answered when all trace of Jack's former self is obliterated. There's one moment where he lashes out, defending a friend who has chatted up the wrong man's girl with a flurry of unhinged violence. But for the most part, Boy A asks us to accept Jack's first article of faith: That this, now, is the real him, and the boy who took a box cutter to a little girl has been left in the past.

Jack lives daily with the threat of exposure, knowing there are those who would gladly take his life if they knew where, or who, he was. But the more normal he becomes, the more tenuous his invisibility grows. Every security camera, every snapshot could be his undoing. He is haunted by his own image.

John Crowley, who previously directed the glib Intermission, approaches Boy A like a cross between Ken Loach and Stanley Kubrick. The world around Jack is normal, but his place in it is anything but, conveyed by off-center compositions where the empty space around Jack's body is a promise and a threat. Floating in the ether, he is constantly searching for a place to put down, but the ground beneath his feet crumbles away, leaving him alone and untethered.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Boy A | Directed by John Crowley | A Weinstein Company release