The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)August 2nd, 2002
Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
Full Price Feature
On some level, we all think we are smarter/better than the other people, the extras in the movies of our lives - these kids as all kids do think they are invincible. They are bored with their safety or escaping their realities and so they make crazy plans and escape into early forays into adulthood, sex, beer, adventure. The film is about our own sense (in childhood or in ego or in despair) of being stronger/better than The Other People, of being the leads in our own tales and about being trapped by our own mythology. We all on some level, at some point (especially in traffic, or a Wal-Mart) look at the people around us and think "I am so much smarter than these people."
Superheroes live with this implicitly, yet still protect and assist those lesser beings. The boys also have the 4 man Atomic Trinity, superheroes who battle evil and hypocrisy. Interstitial animated sections may have interrupted the flow for some but I read it as the subtext of this boys dreams and fantasies, the how it should be, in his mind.
The Catholic church has that same sort of attitude: We are the righteous, and you poor Other heathens will burn. Piousness or accessibility - who is the better teacher for the children? Jodie Foster is a hard-ass nun teacher in their school, devout, pure, but with a fake leg. Foster has no need to live dangerously, she has done so and retreated to the safe haven of the convent, always on edge, afraid of the animus beyond her cell. She lives the straight and narrow life and represents duty and honor and discipline and commitment - she has already had the adventure that took her leg. These boys know nothing of her travail, only mocking her for being a stick in the mud
Vincent D'Onofrio sneaks cigarettes, coaches sports, and doesn't seem to take Catholicism as seriously as Foster, aka Nunzilla. Is Vincent D'Onofrio more disillusioned, or is he more realistic? He assumes the sins of which the boys speak is mere thoughts of lust and nothing more, nothing more, they are just kids. He smokes and he is irreverent and he is accessible to the lay person, but does that follow that he is better or happier?
The kids in the movie are all excellent, and handle their material like they are living it. Kieran Culkin is amazing. In retrospect, Kieran's character reminds me of that played by Corey Feldman in Stand by Me, always up for an adventure, doing crazier and crazier things, with no real concern about personal safety, because there is no safety at home for him.
Moments of the film are sweet, like neutral photographs of childhood, where the park is nothing but dappled tree shade and laughing children, not skinned knees, mosquito bites, or lurking predators. The genuine fun and innocence of childhood (even when being "bad") shines out of this film in a way few films I have seen have done. You can taste it. It could be set in the 1970's, my childhood years, or today - it's hard to tell with Catholic school clothes and so forth, but no car looked newer than 1976ish. This adds to the timelessness of their youth. The darker moments stand out in greater relief after the sense-vacation of sunlight bike rides and harmless shenanigans.
Todd McFarlane's animation sequences counterpoint the inner life of the hero (not-Kieran) with perhaps too much volume but the touching naivete of his age. He doesn't wasn't to win the girl so he can bone her, but so he can go on adventures with her. The snarling representations of the boys' super(hero)egos and their image of their foe translated into comic speech were distracting from the story for some of my companions, but I found them all the more emotionally involving with their very melodrama. How can a boy who can barely comprehend a heavy personal secret react? He doesn't have the vocabulary, not his words or his own empathetic experience. So his green-veined, muscle-bound hero must crush stones and roar to shake the heavens, and our true-life hero can cope.
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These reviews (c) 2002 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but just credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks.
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