Buena Vista | 2009 | 104 Mins. | Rated PG-13
A word of warning: those prone to crying during movies will want to have a box of tissues ready before watching Scott Hicks’ The Boys Are Back. A deeply moving story, the film is based on Simon Carr’s memoir The Boys Are Back in Town, packs an emotional wallop, but some of story’s overall strength gets lost in the films tendency to get carried away with syrupy melodrama.
After the death of his wife Katie (Laura Fraser), Joe Warr (Clive Owen) is left to raise his six-year-old son, Artie (Nicholas McAnulty). Before his wife’s death, Joe, an on-the-go sports-reporter, left the day to details of Nicholas’ life to Katie, while he made sure to bring home a present on each overseas jaunt.
With little clue about how to raise Nicholas, Joe takes the “free reign” approach, treating the six-year-old more like a friend than as a son. However, Nicholas is a kid dealing with a great deal of grief; then most important to him understanding how his mother could die. Unfortunately for him, his father is too much of a kid himself to be able to help him with those questions. While the film wants to paint a sympathetic picture of Joe, the opening scene paints him as an overgrown kid who has a lot of growing up to do. He’s driving his SUV on a beach, fast enough to provoke shouts from everyone he’s passing, while his six-year-old son sits on the hood, barely hanging on to the windshield wipers. As if driving fast and erratically through the sand and splashing surf wasn’t dangerous enough, this dad, laughing, takes out a water gun and starts squirting his son. I’m sure he would be doubled over in hysterics if the kid fell off the hood.
Another set of issues arise when Harry (George Mackay), Joe’s teenage son from a previous marriage, arrives from a pricey British boarding school to spend the summer with them. Raised under a decidedly strict set of rules, Harry easily bonds with Nicholas, and becomes a secondary father figure. Some of the best scenes in the film occur between Nicholas and Harry. Not having read the book, I don’t know what changes were made to the story for the movie, but I kept waiting for Joe to have an Aha moment, where he realizes just because he thinks things are fine, doesn’t mean they are. I wasn’t convinced that ever happened.
Despite all its faults, The Boys are Back still manages to work on a certain level. The film’s first twenty minutes, as we watch Joe’s wife descend into illness, is especially moving, and few will argue that Clive Owen is a fine actor. Most importantly, while Joe may not be the heroic figure the film wants him to be, we do see him as a flawed man who has begun to realize he’s made some mistakes while trying to raise his sons.
The Boys Are Back is presented in 2.35:1 aspect ratio, enhanced for 16×9 television monitors. There’s a noticeable layer of film grain, especially in long shots of the countryside, and edge delineation breaks down a bit in dark scenes. But colors are solid and real-looking, with natural skin-tones.
The default audio is an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround, with a Spanish language track and Spanish subtitles. Like the video, it’s solid but nothing special. There’s no distortion, but for a film that has the main character in airports, inside Rod Laver Arena, and outside in South Australia at night, there really isn’t as much rear-speaker ambient sound as one might have expected.
Two featurettes are included: The Boys Are Back: A Photographic Journey is a montage of photographs from the film’s Australian location with commentary from director Scott Hicks; and A Father and Two Sons, On Set chronicles writer Simon Carr and his sons as they visit the film’s set.
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