Danoff
Premium
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- Mile High City
About a Boy
(learning his first socialist lesson)
Rating: 👎👎
***Disclaimer This is not an attack on England. Just an attack on thinly veiled socialism.***
Rarely do I feel this inclined to rant about a bad movie. I did it for Star Wars III, and now I'm paying entirely too much honor to "About A Boy" by doing the same for it.
The movie was about two guys living in England. About a man (Hugh Grant) who considers himself an "island" - self sufficient, impervious to the rest of the world - and also about a boy who, though trying to be an individual, was not accepted socially. The man, of course, being an adult, was left to his own devices and aside from a self-esteem issue was perfectly content with being a loner. The boy, on the other hand, was in gradeschool where individuality is ridiculed and tormented. So I thought the setup was the boy learning that it's okay to be yourself, ignore the people who laugh at you at school, because it's more important to be happy about who you are. I mean, we live only a short portion of our lives crammed in with every other random kid in our neighborhood - left to the devices of bullies. So surely this will be a movie about how the boy learns to become self-sufficient and learns that when he becomes an adult he will be just fine being himself.
No no no. That's not the message here.
The end of the movie was set up nicely for a cozy ending about believing in yourself, making yourself happy, and finding strength from within. The boy was about to go on stage in front of his classmates (to sing at the school talent show) and make a fool of himself in a misguided attempt to prevent his depressed mother from committing suicide (her only joy in life is hearing him sing). The kid has a terrible voice and doesn't even like singing (he prefers rap) -- he's just doing it for his mom. His big-brother/father-figure friend (hugh grant) steps in and tells him that he can't make his mother happy, that she has to make herself happy, and that he should be who he is. Good advice, but the movie doesn't think so. The boy rejects Hugh's advice and goes out on stage and sings the song, terribly, making a fool of himself in an attempt to make his mother happy. Hugh grant saves the day by jumping out on stage and making a bigger fool of himself to distract the school bullies and save the kid from ridicule. In the end (a few fun-loving family moments later), we learn that no man is an "island", that happiness comes from others and making others happy, not from within. We learn that everyone needs family and friends to make their life meaningful and that no one can go it alone.
Can you tell this movie is situated in England?
The proper ending for the film was for the boy to go out on stage and do his "rap" that he loved doing so much. Hugh Grant could have encouraged him to do it, and his classmates would have thought it was cool. His mom might have realized how she was pushing herself on her son and would have seen what he was really interested in and good at. The boy would finally be liked at school for who he was - rather than who his mother wanted him to be. Instead of being the sacrificial lamb, supposedly earning the love and respect of his friends and family, he would have had something he could truly be proud of - an individual accomplishment, individual talent.
But that's not what happened. Instead, the movie made all the talented individuals degrade what they enjoyed doing, because if you just do what you enjoy, you're selfish and you're not helping other people. The boy enjoyed rapping, so the movie wouldn't let him do it on stage. Hugh Grant enjoyed looking cool, living solo, and playing the bachelor part, which is why it was so important for the movie to make him go degrade himself in front of teenagers at a school talent show. On the other hand, the boy's mother was incredibly needy, needing her son to sing for her in order for her to be happy, and needing other people to come take care of her - and that's why she'd earned her son's humiliation. But in the movie, everyone steps in to help and reward the mother. Because in socialism, the least worthy is the one who gets the reward. Pride and individual talent are not virtues; self-sacrifice and need of others are virtues.
We get more "society first" lessons. Like when Hugh grant confronts the boy's mother about her depression because since it affects her son, and he's friends with her son, it affects him too. The lesson we take from that is that the community has a right to expect certain behavior from everyone, and that everything anyone does affects someone else - and so you're beholden to them and they to you. We also get a few narratives about how not only is an individual not enough, but a couple is not enough. You have to have a big diverse group of friends and family from all sorts of backgrounds who each do things for each other for no apparent reason and all love each other happily and selflessly.
How disgusting.
The movie was horrific even if it had gotten the message right. We're exposed to endless bad acting, constant narration so that the actors don't have to act (badly) and so that scene writers don't have to create scenes that convey concepts with actions or emotions, they can just tell you exactly how they want you to digest the movie. None of the characters are likeable (except Hugh Grant early in the movie as the solo bachelor, when you're supposed to not like him). And the movie was incredibly transparent. At the "low point" about 15-20 minutes before the end of most screenplays, I paused the movie and explained to my wife how it was going to end. Dense, I still didn't realize that the movie was going to turn completely socialist on me - but I did, for the most part, predict the entire ending. I just thought some characters would survive with a shred of dignity.
