I'm hesistant to say too much about Mysterious Skin. It's one of those increasingly rare films that smacks you across the face, and leaves you thinking about the sting long after it has faded away.
I will say this - Mysterious Skin is superbly assured stuff from director Gregg Araki. And remarkably rich - the film is beautifully shot, but has an ugly subject matter; the two teenaged leads (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet) are truly fantastic and despite the painful past that unites them, they express themselves in utterly different, equally compelling ways.
This is distinctly Araki - aliens/polysexuality - but he has reined this is to give the impression of heartbreaking honesty. Of course he was assisted by Scott Heim's extraordinary semi-autobiographical book on which this film is based. Even more encouragingly, Heim has gone on record as endorsing the film as movingly empathetic.
Mysterious Skin could have been a Todd Solondz film, the way it seeks to probe open wounds in a kind of picket-fence America. And though the film arguably generates a Solondzian guilty laugh on occasion, it could not be accused of being misanthropic in the way that Solondz's films so often are. It shows that there can be compassion in pain, and pain in compassion.
Just watched this tonight; I thought it was decent. Not a movie I'd watch multiple times I don't think, but worth watching once. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of my favorite "young actors" out there, which is why I checked this out.
KMC Community Forums
May 20th, 2005 03:20 PM
