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Author
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Topic: Mysterious Skin
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Steve Scott
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1300
From: Minneapolis, MN
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted 07-09-2005 11:18 AM
Hard content to watch, but a beautifully styled production give this film about the effects of child molestation through teenage life in America. Joseph Gordon Levitt and Brady Corbet play the post-high school characters, whose encounter ten years prior with their little league coach leaves each of them scarred in different ways. Corbet's character has blocked the event from memory, involuntarily reinterpreting the event as an alien abduction, with which he becomes obsessed with finding the truth about. Levitt's character, instead, embraces this skewed sexuality by selling himself to older men throughout the Kansas City suburb he lives in.
The second act brings Levitt's character to New York, where his beliefs about the innocence of his lifestyle are invariably altered through a series of intense intimate encounters; while Corbet's investigation brings him closer to the truth through Levitt's mother and friend. The film's conclusion is dispellingly tragic as the connection between the leading characters shifts them both out of the lives they've existed in over the past ten years and into the big empty that neither of them could have identified without the other.
There are elements of this film that paint the underbelly of midwest life perfectly. The script rarely sidesteps the broad issues that are no doubt uncomfortable for some viewers, but it never indulges in any of them. Levitt and Corbet are believable, never losing their key inner dynamics, even though most of the dialouge is either blunt or seemingly general. But the melancholy to technical details like such allow the pure emotion of the film to sturggle in front of the viewers eyes as the film continues, unforgiving (much like the world around the actors) up until the very end.
Definately not a film for anyone with illusions about predatory relationships or homophobia. It certainly doesn't declassifly any aspects of gay life, nor does it push any details to new extremes. It pushes past a "Dateline NBC" report on child molestation, so if you see this, be ready to see with both eyes disillusioned.
Viewed at Landmark's Lagoon in Minneapolis, aud. 2, full house of about 100. Print had bad vertical scratches along the non-soundtrack side, and the automation didn't cue down until thirty min. into the show. Not as distracting as the couple paraphrasing the film for each other, seated behind me.
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