TIFF Report: SON OF RAMBOW Review
The real Garth Jennings just stood up. After an admirable but flawed turn as director-for-hire on the big budget adaptation of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - difficult material to adapt under the best of circumstances, well nigh impossible if you need to take commercial issues and a target audience made up of people largely unfamiliar with the books under consideration - Jennings returns here with his sophomore film as a director but his debut as a writer. Son of Rambow is a film literally years in the making, a film Jennings simply refused to give up on despite years of being denied financing, a film that surely represents who Jennings is much, much better than did Hitchhikers and, thus, is a film that marks Jennings as simply an enormous talent blessed equally with the visual whimsy of a Michel Gondry and the earnest heart tugging of the millions era Danny Boyle. The man is a technical whiz who employs his wizardry in the service of humanity, someone who managed the difficult task of growing up without losing any of the wonder of childhood. Yes, I flat out love this film.
Eleven year old Will lives a lonely life. His father dead of a tragedy not spoken of by the rest of the family, Will's life now revolves around his mother, grandmother, younger sister and the Plymouth Brethren church. The Plymouth are the most conservative of the Brethren sects, they are conservative in their dress, limit their use of technology and wary of connections to any outside the church. Television is forbidden, as are movies and any number of other social activities. And so, though Will attends a public school, he has no friends whatsoever. How could he when he has nothing in common with them? What Will does have is an incredibly active imagination and a restless pencil, the boy is drawing, drawing, forever drawing, capturing the worlds that bloom in his fertile imagination in the constraints of paper and graphite.
Life changes for Will when he meets Lee Carter. Lee is flat-out hell on wheels - a lying, stealing, swearing little con man ready to play anyone and everything to his advantage. Meeting in the school hallway - Will there while the rest of his class watches a geography documentary on a forbidden-to-him television set, Lee kicked out of class for being Lee - Will is completely unequipped to recognize Lee for what he is, accepts his lies immediately as god's honest truth, and idolizes the charismatic boy from the moment he lays eyes on him. Lee responds to this by scamming Will for his dead father's watch and making Will pedal him home on a stolen bicycle. Simply meeting Lee would likely have been enough to shatter the walls around Will's carefully confined world but the doors to Will's perception are blown completely off their hinges when Lee shows him a pirated copy of First Blood. This, obviously, is the Best Thing Ever. It just so happens that Lee has a video camera and a hankering to win a BBC-sponsored short film contest and he sees immediately in Will a willing stunt man, later an imaginative force who will assume controls of their contest entry film: The Son of Rambow.
Son of Rambow - Jennings' film, not Will and Lee's - is a simply sparkling piece of work, a comedic gem rooted in innocence, wonder, nostalgia, visual wizardry, pretentious French exchange students, a flying dog, and acres of heart. Jennings' remembrance of childhood is every bit as accurate as it is hysterical, his eye for the eighties absolutely spot on. His dialog is dazzling, the soundtrack a textbook example of how music can set and manipulate tone, grace notes and sly asides pepper the run time, the visual effects creative and absolutely integral to the characters. But what really makes this film go are the actors.
The support cast is uniformly strong. Spaced's Jessica Stevenson gets a rare major role as Will's mother and shines in it, Jules Sitruk is brilliant as the absurdly hip exchange student Didier, and every one of the teachers, students and church members in Will's life is given sharply drawn, immediately distinct characters. Jennings has created here a fully functional absolutely believable world, a world where every one of these people lives and breathes and maintains a full and rich life even when off screen. You need no suspension of disbelief here because there is nothing to disbelieve. The core of the film, though, are Bill Milner and Will Poulter as Will and Lee, respectively. The two young actors are revelatory, their performances flawless, their relationship utterly compelling and believable as they gradually move towards a deep and true friendship rooted in their own unique forms of social isolation. Jennings gets his script absolutely spot on when it comes to these two young boys and Milner and Poulter both turn is absolutely flawless performances.
Son of Rambow is everything you could ask for in a feel good film. It is smart, funny, nostalgic, inventive, and instantly recognizable. He remembers what childhood is and he adores it, even the difficult bits, and we get to go along for the ride. Sure, everybody knows it's going to have a happy ending, just as they know that Jennings et al are playing on their heartstrings throughout but the story feels so clearly and absolutely right, Jennings is so careful to earn what he asks of his audience, that you can do nothing but applaud him for how well he pulls it off.
