As seen at the 2008 Los Angeles Film
Festival:
The surreally-lit opening moments of
Boy A, in which a young man gleefully opens a package of
Nike shoes handed to him by an older figure sitting opposite him
at a barren table, are nothing short of transfixing in their
mysterious nature. While literally blinded by the sense of hope
presented by lightly tinted film-stock, there is a dark
undercurrent that runs through the frames. When the viewer
discovers that the man onscreen, Jack Burridge (Andrew
Garfield), is actually an ex-con who was prison-sentenced in a
high-profile child-murder case and the person sitting across
from him is Terry (Peter Mullan), a worker who helps criminals
keep under the radar while readjusting to civilian life, the
experience becomes downright otherworldly. Yes, there’s an
undeniable realism to Boy A—such is what allows the
viewer to buy into Jack’s past and its accompanying sense of
tragedy—but the movie is largely told through innate feelings.
Intimately framed from Jack’s claustrophobic emotional
perspective, the movie whizzes by in a flurry, nearly coming
across as a work of abstract art because it taps into the
viewer’s senses in ways that a conventional story of the like
would never think to try. The movie finds unexpected power in
exploring ideas that similar material rarely has before,
particularly in a story-thread involving a woman Jack begins to
fall for and in passages in which Jack’s safety is threatened by
those who believe he got off too easily for his crime.
Despite the
often-condemnable senses of morality presented by previous films
with similar premises, Boy A proves anything but the
standard exercise in liberal-guilt that forces its audience to
sympathize with a horrible criminal. The picture rightly doesn’t
allow the viewer to know enough about Jack’s crime for them to
judge him during its first-act and then shows what really
happened once they come to understand Jack on a personal level.
In fact, the tragic details that surface regarding Jack’s crime
ultimately lead the viewer to realize that the man isn’t a
traditional ex-con in the slightest. He becomes sympathetic for
his own unexploited character values. And this sympathy is only
furthered when the viewer learns of Jack’s ultimate fate in an
unpredictable and heart-stopping third-act; the material is
touching and maddening and yet completely unchangeable, riveting
in its rattling inevitability. Coupling gut-wrenching emotion
with hints of wispy surrealism, director John Crowley and lead
actors Garfield and Mullan ensure that the audience is
constantly both engrossed in their film’s material and
subsequently reflecting upon it. For its original take on the
traditional ex-con story and its supremely affecting characters,
Boy A may very well come to be known as a
minor-masterpiece if it manages to reach the sizable audience
that it deserves.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
Review Published on: 7.23.2008
Screened on: 6.29.2008 at the
Landmark in West Los Angeles, CA.
