Kid-Thing is not, by any means, a terrible movie. The latest
effort from brothers David and Nathan Zellner is the tale of a young girl
caught in less than ideal circumstances, and at its core, the idea is somewhat
novel and interesting. To be perfectly frank, however, Kid-Thing is a film that is unlikely to see much attention outside
of the film festival circuit, as it relies far too heavily on heavy-handed
whimsy, childhood nostalgia, and the odd chuckle to carry its rather
non-eventful plot along.
Annie (Sydney Aguirre)
is a young girl who lives in a rural area with two men (her exact relationship
to them is never made clear), who keep her semi-nourished and with a place to
sleep, but do very little else in the way of parenting. Marvin (Nathan Zellner) isn't a bad guy, he's
just an idiot, and may or may not be depressed (this is hinted, at but never
fully explored). As such, Annie is left to fill her days with aimless
wandering, shoplifting, and random acts of innocent, childhood destruction. One
day, while playing in the woods, she hears an elderly woman calling for help
from an abandoned well, and after a brief and hostile interrogation, chooses to
leave the woman there. The rest of the film follows Annie as she...wanders
around, shoplifts, and destroys things, every now and again returning to the
well to ask more questions of the mysterious woman before running off once
more.
Annie is a believable and even somewhat sympathetic
character, but she remains static through the bulk of the story, only
begrudgingly helping the trapped woman after we're treated to many long,
meandering scenes completely unrelated to the central conflict. These moments
reveal little to us about Annie's situation that we don't already know from the
opening moments. The ending, ambiguous at best, forces us to wonder exactly
what the Zellner brothers were trying to tell us about childhood, nature versus
nurtures, and why we should care. Such a non-story could be forgiven were the
film at least visually compelling, but shots of dull, uninteresting locations
linger for excruciating amounts of time, filling out the running time with
unnecessary dead air.
A former professor of mine once explained non-traditional
narrative filmmaking as the difference between using your camera as paintbrush or
a window. If the Zellner brothers set out to craft their film as a window into
the world of a child with few friends and no loved ones, they have succeeded,
but to what end? Annie's refusal to trust anyone or extend kindness is
understandable within the context of her environment, but the observations made
by Kid-Thing are dull and
uninspiring. Perhaps that's the point the Zellner brothers are trying to make,
and an argument could be made that the story's structure intentionally mirrors
that of Annie's adolescence, but it doesn't make for particularly interesting
filmmaking. The truth of the matter is, Kid-Thing
might have made a decent short, but as it is, the dragging narrative and ho-hum
visuals make for a rather tiresome feature.