L.I.E. Review
by Harvey S. Karten (film_critic AT compuserve DOT com)August 6th, 2001
L.I.E.
Reviewed by Harvey Karten
Lot 47 Films
Director: Michael Cuesta
Writer: Stephen M. Ryder, Michael Cuesta, Gerald Cuesta
Cast: Brian Cox, Paul Franklin Dano, Billy Kay, Bruce Altman, James Costa, Tony Michael Donnelly, Walter Masterson, Marcia DeBonis, Adam LeFevre
I recently read an article which (believe it or not) contends that teenagers as a whole in the U.S. are confident, stable, and by the usual standards, mature. You'd never know this from the way movies portray adolescents, but then again you don't want to see a movie about a teen who is confident, stable and mature, do you? Since it's easier to find real life teens who are disturbed than to unearth situations in which helicopters are shot down and cars plow into Chinatown vegetable stands, a movie like "L.I.E." can be touching. Nowadays so many young people are emotionally or physically discarded by their parents (like Steven Spielberg's David) that we can believe kids--whether products of crowded cities or capacious suburbs--get screwed up. Larry Clark mined this territory with his incisive "Kids," about big city youth who deflower virgins and otherwise make trouble, picking up steam in his current offering "Bully," about how a group of boys and girls treat a tormentor with extreme prejudice rather than simply try to reason with him.
Michael Cuesta's "L.I.E.," which enjoyed a debut at the recent New Directors, New Films festival in New York, probes the mind of a 15-year-old, Howie Blitzer (Paul Franklin Dano), who has been physically abandoned by his mother (she died in a car accident) and both physically and emotionally deserted by his dad. Cuesta, using a screenplay he wrote together with Stephen M. Ryder and Gerald Cuesta, employs as his metaphor the world's biggest parking lot known as the Long Island Expressway. The L.I.E., which takes people east and west and sometimes "straight to hell" as Howie puts it, is both a connection to the outside world for the young resident of New York's Suffolk County and, for the people it killed like his mother, the songwriter Harry Chapin and film director Alan J. Pakula, a final destination.
"L.I.E." takes off by showing the 15-year-old chilling out with his friends, the sorts that only a mother could love, inluding the spaced out Gary (Billy Kay) who makes a buck supplying sex to drivers who stop for him just by a sign that says "Welcome to Long Island." Under Gary's influence, Howie sneaks with his pals into homes and steals money, jewelry, and in one case a pair of valuable antique guns. When the owner of the residence with antique guns, Big John Harrigan (Brian Cox)--whose license plate "B.J." carries with it a double-entendre--almost catches Howie, ripping a piece of his jeans from the boy's leg, John coasts around the neighborhood look for the kid with the damaged jeans like a prince searching for Cinderella. When John at several points sniffs the blue swatch that he has literally ripped off as though it were infused with Chanel No. 5, we're tipped that the man may be a pederast.
Cuesta shows his two principals as complex characters, a welcome change from the sort of melodramatic Hollywood fare that separates the white hats from the black. For his part, John seeks sexual action at his favorite pit stop on the L.I.E. even as he boards his lad du jour in his messy home. At
the same time, though, he takes terrific care of his prey. When Howie, whose real estate developer dad is busted by the F.B.I. thereby leaving Howie with an empty house, John takes him in and lovingly cooks a lavish breakfast which the boy gobbles up hungrily. Howie is himself a mixed bag, a housebreaker who is at the same time a poet--not only spinning out verse of his own but spouting memorized lines from the works of Walt Whitman as he does in a particularly tender moment while sitting next to John and driving the big man's car.
Though the end provides a dramatic payoff which is not sincerely earned, Cuesta scores with "L.I.E." thanks to the work of Brian Cox, a performer who has appeared in everything from Royal Shakespeare company productions and feature films like "Braveheart" to roles in challenging indie fare like "Rushmore" and "The Boxer." In Howie's role, Paul Franklin Dano has stepped off the Broadway stage to turn in a convincing portrait of a mixed-up kid who learns quite a bit about himself in his relationship with the kind pederast. Romeo Tirone's surreal images of the Long Island Expressway provide us with the picture's mood, one of frenzied people going east and west and getting nowhere.
Rated NC-17. Running time: 97 minutes. (C) 2001 by
Harvey Karten, [email protected]
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