British producer Jeremy Thomas made his directorial debut with this drama adapted from the novel by Walker Hamilton. Hindered by a childhood auto accident, teen Bobby (Christian Bale) is a misfit from a well-to-do family; he suffers yet another setback after the premature death of his mother. His stern stepfather, the evil De Winter (Daniel Benzali) labels Bobby "subnormal" and schemes to trick the youth into signing over the family department store. Bobby calls DeWinter "The Fat." To escape The
Fat's clutches, Bobby takes off, hitchhiking to Cornwall. The trip ends when the teen causes an accident while trying to keep the driver from intentionally running over a fox. The driver is killed in the crash. Bobby then meets the antisocial Mr. Summers (John Hurt) who states, "People are of no value at all as far as I'm concerned." Summers allows Bobby to move into his shack, eventually revealing his past criminal life, and the two team to confront The Fat in London. Filmed in Cornwall and the Isle of Man. Shown in the Certain Regard section at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Bhob Stewart, Rovi
[It] refuses to reduce its story to simple terms, and the visible story seems like a manifestation of dark and secret undercurrents. Even the ending, which some will no doubt consider routine revenge, has a certain subterranean irony.
The adoption of 19th-century-melodrama conventions seems motivated mainly by a desire to tap into the emotional intensity they offer. I was enthralled by these tactics, but some viewers might gag.
Would seem hokey if it didn't have powerful, extraordinary central performances and cinematography that lends the English landscape around Cornwall a mythical cast.
Based on a 1969 novel by the late Walker Hamilton, this moody film is ravishingly beautiful to look at and refreshingly unlike the glib, movie-centric crime thrillers so popular with younger first-time directors.
Christian Bale is utterly sympathetic and engaging as Bobby. He convincingly communicates both the simplicity and chaos of his character's personality and gives the film a strong emotional core.
If you can allow for one irrational and unbelievable scene involving Bobby and Summers' trip to London, you're left with a decent, small- scale movie, perhaps more suitable for video than the large screen.
Um...pretty good. Good acting and all that, and the plot is certainly odd and enjoyable. The moral of the story is don't kill animals, just kill people if they deserve it. The step father acts in the last half hour of the film in ways that don't make any sense, especially in his demise. I must also add that I get tired
of movies where the main character goes on about how perfect nature is and how bad people are (i.e. Instinct). What this guy doesn't get is that animals kill each other all the time, for food or for territory, or no apparent reason at all, that some animals need to eat dead animals to survive (so burying them only hurts animals), and that feeding mice and cockroaches so they don't 'steal' from you is really only going to increase the population of these creatures until they will steal from you. These mentalities are only fit for 'against the man' high school children and for environmentalists who have never stepped foot outside or read a book about how violent and unfair nature is. Ok, the end.
August 3, 2008
Curtis Lilly
Super Reviewer
I am a big fan of Christian Bale and, for many years more, of John Hurt. They both do their very best with these characters and I'm certain that with less talented actors this could have been an abysmal film. There are noticeable flaws in the logic of the plot and some pretty tacky direction which in combination make
it seem rather like a B-grade afternoon kids soapie.Too many scenes are either unnecessary or painfully drawn out. It's very likely that some artful editing would have made a vastly superior 80 minute feature from this 112 minutes.Being vegetarian and an animal lover, I felt some empathy for the main characters but there's not all that much depth to them. The evil step-father is portrayed as just too much of a villainous cliché.
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