Every time I rent movies, they give me a voucher for Next Time. I'm such a sucker, I keep on using them. So Saturday I redeemed a voucher for 2 new release movies for a certain price (hmmm - way more than cheap Tuesday prices...). The first I watched Saturday night, and it's not a movie I would have borrowed 3 months ago.
3 months ago I saw We Need to Talk About Kevin. That movie is still with me, popping into my head and swimming around. I think it will take a very long time to digest. I mention it because it involves a school shooting, and Saturday's movie, Beautiful Boy, also involved a school shooting. A lot of the time while watching, I was comparing aspects of the 2 movies.
Beautiful Boy is the story of 2 parents, who are at that stage of "Let's try to work things out". Their only child is in his first year of college when he suicides after shooting several fellow students and teachers. The parents are dealing with losing their child, supporting each other, facing a world of criticism, and trying to work out what they did to raise a killer.
I don't think any parent would want this for their child. Parents do their best not to screw up their children, to raise healthy, happy, well-adjusted kids. Yet the assumptions and judgments that are made by the rest of society are so harsh. And I must admit to being guilty of this. Watching something on tv, for example, I'll think "Yeah, that's the way he is now, but why didn't his parents make him do this before?" And that's just a small step to "What did his parents do to turn him into a mass-murderer?" Why do we feel we must judge another human being, who is just trying to do their best with the information that they have?
Meanwhile, I don't know if it's coincidence, but the similarities between the situations of the killers in both Beautiful Boy and We Need to Talk About Kevin are noticeable. Both lived in large, open houses - the sort featured in fancy home magazines, that I always think would take forever to clean, and feel unlived-in even when full of people and stuff because there's nowhere for intimacy. Both were functional singles (as in, effectively an only child). Both had a father who worked away from home in a regular office-type job, and a high-achiever for a mother, who expected great things from her son and kept pushing for better.
The DVD cover promised powerful performances. No other way to say it, this was really powerful. I knew I would cry, and I did (buckets). The individual reactions of the parents to the news that their son was dead, that he was the one who had shot all those people, was so true. And after seeing the father absorb so much criticism and hate, his outburst is so compelling and gut-wrenching. One thing I've been noticing more and more lately is music in movies, or its absence. This was not free of music, but it was used sparingly. I was trying to pinpoint what was so weird about this - after all, real life doesn't come with a soundtrack - but actually, my life does. There is always music in my head or fingers, and if it's not an actual piece, then it will be a particular arpeggio. I know that's an incredibly weird thing to admit. But seeing something which is silent, even when it's not silent because it's about to be horrifyingly scary - well, that's just really weird. Effective, but weird.
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